For most filmmakers, getting the MPAA’s dreaded NC-17 rating pasted onto your film is the ultimate kiss of death. NC-17 was brought in a few years ago to replace the highly stigmatized X rating for films. Even though quite a lot of great films originally had the X rating upon their initial release, Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange come to mind, during the 1970s the rating itself came to mean in the collective American mindset only one kind of film: pornography. So much so that it pretty much stopped being a credible rating certification at all and turned into a sort of porn film promotional gimmick. For porn filmmakers, claiming your movie was rated X, even though very few if any of them ever even got any kind of MPAA rating, was key. Not that any of those crappy porn flicks in question wouldn’t have been slapped with an X rating had they bothered the MPAA to screen them. I mean, it is porn. But hey, why go through the effort when all you gotta do is just say you’re rated X? Just slap the X on the front, or better yet, put XXX on the poster or video tape or whatever, because three Xs just has to be raunchier than one. XXX has never been any kind of rating at all, official or otherwise, of course. It’s nothing more that an adult film marketing ploy.

 

So with all that going on, the MPAA changed the rating system, getting rid of X as any kind of official rating, and creating the less suggestive NC-17 rating to cover certain films that they felt were just too violent or sexual or whatever for immature audiences. All well and good. Now they had a rating that wasn’t so stigmatized by the suggestion of pornography. But while that was a definite improvement, there still is a stigma to NC-17. Even though NC-17 films are seen as more than just porn, they are still considered obscene by the more prudish, and therefore inappropriate for their given communities. So NC-17 films can’t advertise in a lot of newspapers, or on television, and a lot of theaters across the country will simply refuse to play your film at all if it doesn’t manage an R rating. Many filmmakers have it in their contracts with production and distribution companies that they cannot make films that will get an NC-17 rating, and many prominent films have been dramatically edited for that reason alone.

Only a few films in any given year ever get the dreaded NC-17 rating. It’s just too much of a financial burden to cope with. I can think of only a few recently. Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies, and John Waters’ A Dirty Shame. And of course, the film I just went to see, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution.

Lust, Caution is the story of Wang Jiazhi, a young woman who is working with the Chinese resistance against the Japanese occupation during World War II. Her mission is to help orchestrate the assassination of a prominent collaborator, Mr. Yee, by initiating a sexual affair with him, in the hopes of gaining his trust and leading him into a situation where he is vulnerable to attack. At the very start of this film we see her arranging this very moment, and then go back to four years earlier to see all the events in her recent life that have led her to this point. It’s kind of a clichéd story structure, the kind I’ve seen a million times before (best done in Sunset Boulevard, by the way), and here it seems to be the best approach to the story, although the execution of it is really kind of pedestrian at best.

There seemed to me to be just a little too much about the early beginnings of her involvement in clandestine activities, when she is in school and her naïve group of friends get together and decide to assassinate Mr. Yee originally on their own. I understand that this first pathetic attempt is needed to show how she has an in to his life later on, but I really don’t think the amount of time spent in this act really served the more integral part of the story, which is the relationship between Jiazhi and Mr. Yee. It was almost an hour of the film, when it really should have been over with in about thirty minutes.

But after that bit is done, the focus on the affair finally gets started. Man oh man, does it get started.

I don’t really need to have sex scenes in films I watch. Looking over my personal film collection, I’m not sure there’s so much as a nipple in any of those movies outside of Animal House (Yes, I own Animal House. So sue me.). Don’t get me wrong- I’m no prude by any stretch of the imagination. Just when it comes to film, that really isn’t the kind of entertainment or pleasure I am looking for. It doesn’t bother me if someone drops trou in a movie, but its not something I go out of my way to watch either. The only time I really care one way or the other at all is when the sex is overly gratuitous and unnecessary in a movie, or if it is very noticeable by its absence.

(I’m sorry, Mr. Nichols, but if a character in your film Closer is a stripper, and you actually have a scene with her at work, it really is kind of ridiculous and offputting when the camera goes out of its way to avoid any amount of nudity in the scene. If Natalie Portman didn’t want to be naked on film, she really shouldn’t take acting roles as an exotic dancer.)

That being said, there is a good deal of sex in Lust, Caution. Not the most I have seen in a movie, but it is definitely there. And some pretty advanced positions too. A few that I think I might wanna try next time I get the opportunity. And while it is true that the first tryst between Jiazhi and Mr. Yee is uncomfortable to watch to say the least, and the rest are very explicit, I maintain that with this story it is completely necessary. I mean, Mr. Yee is really kind of a cold fish, not prone to expressing his emotions at all, so there has to be something to show why Jiazhi grows so attached to him.

Sure, a little more depth on his character or humanistic qualities could have done it too, but I don’t think in quite the right way. I don’t think Ang Lee wanted the audience to feel sympathetic towards this man, and you really don’t, because even though he is pretty damn good in bed he still is a Japanese collaborator. Considering what the Japanese were doing in China at the time, I’m not sure a couple of caring human moments really should redeem a person who could go along with it. So I think for this film to work, it really had to be a much more sexual bond between the two.

All in all, not a bad film. Perhaps it suffers from not spending enough time on the main story and wasting so much time on all the backstory. I think the weak utilization of time and the lack of focus in places unfortunately keeps this pretty good movie from becoming a really great movie. Still worth watching, though. Even if just to see something you might want to try out with your significant other later that night.