Quote:
Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” is first languid, then passionate, as it tells the story of a young woman who joins a political murder plot and then becomes emotionally involved with her enemy. It begins at a 1942 Mah-Jongg game in Hong Kong, when erotic undertones become clearly audible to us, and then flashes back to Shanghai, 1938, during the Japanese occupation of China. One of the rich ladies at the game table is revealed to have been a college student, and not really the wife of a wealthy (but unseen) tycoon.

The underlying plot gradually reveals itself. Too gradually, some will believe, unless the languor is necessary to create the hothouse atmosphere that survives in the midst of war. The Mah-Jongg game is taking place in the home of Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), whose wife (Joan Chen) is the hostess. Since coming from Shanghai, he has moved up in the collaborationist government, handles interrogations and tortures, and is repaid by status and access to such restricted items as nylon stockings, cigarettes, even diamonds. When Mr. Yee comes home in the middle of the game, he exchanges a significant look with Mrs. Mak (Tang Wei), who first joined the circle in Shanghai.

It’s clear to us there’s something secret and intimate between them. But who is this wealthy Mrs. Mak, who travels in a chauffeured car but whose husband is always away on business? The flashback reveals her as Wong Chia Chi, a young student who on summer vacation falls in with a group of radical Chinese patriots and takes a key role in their hope of assassinating one of the Chinese who are working with the Japanese. Her assignment: become Mr. Yee’s lover.

This she did in Shanghai, but the war separated them before she was able to bring about an opportunity for Yee’s murder (she is not expected to do it herself). A natural actress, she took easily to the roles of lover and rich woman. But she had some difficulty in sacrificing her virginity, which was necessary for her to play a married woman convincingly.

We do not see Mr. Yee at work, torturing his countrymen, but Leung is able to project the man’s capability for menace and begins to do that in bed with her. Then commence the scenes that earned the film its NC-17 rating. They are not specifically hard core in detail, but involve so many arcane and athletic sexual positions that the MPAA’s injunction against the depiction of “thrusting” is left with their clothes on the floor.

When their sex drifts steadily into S&M, the nature of their relationship shifts. It is impossible to say that Wong Chia Chi/Mrs. Mak likes his tastes in pain and bondage, but they create a fearful intimacy that, for both of them, transcends their lives apart. And it is that tension, between private fascination and public danger, that gives the movie its purpose.

Failing to find the connecting link between such Ang Lee films as “Sense and Sensibility,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Hulk,” I was quickly corrected by readers who said, obviously, all his films are about people trying to realize their essential natures despite the constraints of society. Readers, you were right. Here we have a woman who hates her lover enough to help kill him, and yet is mesmerized by him. And a man whose official position would be destroyed by the exposure of this affair (especially if Mrs. Mak’s true identity were discovered). Yet the heart, as Pascal said, has its reasons. Mr. Yee and Mrs. Mak are just as transgressive as the Brokeback lovers, just as entranced by a form of sex that is frowned on by their societies.

There is not a frame of the film that is not beautiful, but there may be too many frames. Why does Ang Lee go into such depth and detail to establish this world, and why does he delay the film’s crucial scenes? I don’t know, but of course seeing the film the first time I didn’t know that was what he was doing and grew restless before I grew involved. Asked to edit the sex scenes to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating, Lee quite properly refused and was backed all the way by James Schamus, his co-writer and also, significantly, head of Focus Features, which is releasing the film.

The nature of the sex is Lee’s subject, and he is too honest to suppress that. His moments of full frontal nudity avoid the awkwardness of most movie sex scenes in which the lovers, although alone, carefully mask their naughty bits. The scenes are not edited for erotic effect, it must be observed, but are treated in terms of their psychological meaning.

Film by film, Ang Lee, from Taipei out of the University of Illinois, has become one of the world’s leading directors. This film was his second Golden Lion winner in three years at the Venice Film Festival. But it is not among his best films. It lacks the focus and fire that his characters finally find. Less sense, more sensibility.

	
Ang Lee - (2007) Lust, Caution.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 38 min
Size: 	3.39 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 825 kb/s
BPP: 	0.200
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/25EA94703AA44DA/Ang_Lee_-_(2007)_Lust,_Caution.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English

The post Ang Lee – Se, jie AKA Lust, Caution (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

PLOT:
A detective investigating a man’s death in the mountains meets the dead man’s mysterious wife in the course of his dogged sleuthing.

Quote:
Korean director Park Chan-wook was once the master of gonzo revenge violence but with the adaptation of the Sarah Waters novel The Handmaiden in 2016 he pivoted with flair to the elegantly designed suspense thriller. And it is in this spirit that he’s back in Cannes with this sensational black-widow noir romance, featuring a glorious leading turn from the Chinese star Tang Wei, who has bettered her iconic performance in Ang Lee’s 2007 spy drama Lust, Caution. She is effortlessly charismatic and (that overworked word) mesmeric; sexual but reserved, strong, capable, intimidatingly smart but bearing a poignant and unacknowledged emotional wound. And the intelligence and live-wire energy she brings to her relationship with the film’s leading man, Park Hae-il, is a marvel.

The tension and the intrigue, the grandstanding emotional confrontations, the ingenious use of mobile phone technology (which so often stymies modern-day thrillers), the stylish set pieces, including a fantastic rooftop chase, and the deliciously manipulative plot twists are very Hitchcockian in their way. But the style is not pastiche, which is the way that idea usually arises; this is the kind of Hitchcockian film made by someone who hasn’t necessarily seen a Hitchcock film before.

The setting is Busan where a cop called Hae-Joon is struggling with an unsolved murder case featuring a couple of known hoodlum suspects, one of whom resists arrest and gets a ferocious beating from Hae-Joon who then thoughtfully comments that this guy was not tough enough to be the villain he’s looking for. Hae-Joon is sort-of-happily married to Jung-an (Lee Jung-hyun), but he’s longing for the cigarettes she won’t let him smoke and is suffering from insomnia, which means that he takes surveillance and stake-out jobs because he can’t sleep anyway. Then a puzzling new case electrifies him. The smashed body of a climber is found at the foot of a well-known climbing rock. Did he fall? Did he take his own life? Or did someone push him?

On the man’s mobile phone the police find sinister photos of a woman’s beaten and bruised body. And his beautiful wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei), instantly captivates Hae-Joon with her dignity and reserve. She is a caregiver who is loved by the old people she tends to, and the Korean patriot in Hae-jun is moved by her personal story: Seo-rae came to Korea as an illegal, passionate about Korea as the homeland of her grandfather who was a soldier in the nation’s defence against Japan in the 1930s. Seo-rae has an alibi for the time of death, but as the circumstantial evidence mounts against her, Hae-Joon begins to fall deeply in love with this woman, who appears also to be falling for him, her protector.

Is Hae-Joon going to cover up for Seo-rae? Is she all that she appears to be? Well, audiences might think they broadly know the answers to both those questions, but the script by Park and Chung Seo-Kyung keeps you off-balance at every turn, periodically hitting you with new characters and fresh developments that you have to wait to understand. But each new scene had me propped further forward on my seat – further still for the second and then the third act – and Cho Young-Wuk’s musical score forthrightly ratchets up the fear. And in every corner of the detective’s life he finds a variation on a single question: at what point do you decide your marriage isn’t working? When do you know that you are in love? What will trigger the decision to leave? It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.
TheGuardian

3.13GB | 2h 18m | 1024×428 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/CF06FF9A043B161/Decision.to.Leave.2022.Park.Chan-wook.576p.BluRay.x264.mkv

Language:Korean
Subtitles:English,French,French [SDH]

The post Park Chan-wook – Heojil kyolshim AKA Decision to Leave (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
A quiet villager survives an attack by thugs miraculously — or is there more to this humble villager than meets the eye? The miraculous feat draws the attention of a detective with a keen eye. The villager is a hero in the eyes of his family and the townsfolk, but the detective won’t let the matter rest. Further investigation reveals a startling past that the villager wants to leave behind. So too does the investigator have a past he wishes he could forget. Soon the lives and the roles of the villager and the detective blur as each man does what he feels he must.

2.80GB | 1h 54m | 1024×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D05424F7B9FD8EE/Swordsmen_(Dragon)_(2011)_–_Peter_Ho-Sun_Chan.mkv
or
https://fikper.com/SO91kL2CxY/Swordsmen_(Dragon)_(2011)_–_Peter_Ho-Sun_Chan.mkv.html

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English,Russian (muxed)

The post Peter Ho-Sun Chan – Wu xia AKA Swordsmen AKA Dragon (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.