American Cinematographer - October 2007 - (Page 49)

Opposite: An affair between a college student, Chia Chih (Tang Wei), and a high-ranking bureaucrat, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), is not quite what it seems in Lust, Caution. This page, top: In her effort to get close to Yee, Chia Chih works her way into the good graces of his wife (Joan Chen). Below: Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC points the way on the Nanking Road set at Shanghai Studios. director tackles yet another genre: film noir. The screenplay expands upon Chang’s 28-page story, dramatizing the backstory of its main character, Chia Chih Wong (played by Tang Wei). While attending Hong Kong University, she is recruited to join a student theater group and blossoms as an actress. Eventually the students’ anti-Japanese productions morph into plans for more drastic action: murdering a member of the puppet government, security minister Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). The bait will be Chia Chih, who is instructed to befriend Mrs. Yee (Joan Chen) and seduce her sinister husband. When the Yees suddenly move to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, however, the plan falls apart — but only for a time. Soon the students regroup on the mainland and are taken in by the resistance, who properly train Chia Chih for her role as a femme fatale. She plays this part to perfection, ensnaring the cautious but susceptible security chief in a sexual relationship. Her instructions are to maneuver Yee into a situation where he can be assassinated. According to Prieto, Lust, Caution was more complicated than Brokeback Mountain in every respect. “Brokeback was almost like therapy for Ang, who’d just done Hulk and Crouching Tiger,” says the cinematographer, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on Brokeback. “He wanted to scale down and do something more intimate and simple.” As Lee recalls, “I decided I was not going to get angry or frustrated, I was just going to learn to love moviemaking again. So [Brokeback] was done with a minimum — great acting and shot very simply, almost like my first movie. On Lust, Caution, I got ambitious again.” The shoot, which lasted five months, was “very intense,” adds the director. “The style is very different — more genreaware, yet at the same time more controlled and more delicate.” Photos courtesy of Focus Features. American Cinematographer 49

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American Cinematographer - October 2007

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