Lust, Caution

Lust, Caution is a great movie indeed. Mileage, depending on taste, will vary--the film is too long, though it never drags, and it's not quite the "thriller" it's being marketed as--but the acting is indisputably stellar. Newcomer Tang Wei and the ever-soulful Tony Leung are just riveting. I haven't seen any Tony Leung films but I've heard so much about him. This kind of nuanced acting is so rarely seen that just watching Wei play innocence and conspiracy, love and hate, truth and lies, compassion and patriotism, is justification alone to introduce this film to friends.

Some scenes of the movie have lingered in my mind and here are some questions Lust, Caution put into my head:
(I agree with what Daph put here and don't want to repeat.)

1. When a group of students decides to go from putting on patriotic plays to raise money to fight the Japanese occupiers, are they heroes, assassins, or reckless children? We'd call them "terrorists" today, right? What are the moral implications of just sitting around one day going, "Oh ... we could just kill a guy."

2. Why is one early scene of unexpected violence so awful, so gut-wrenchingly horrible? We don't particularly care about the victim, but we are as much shocked as this group of young people. There are no visible narrative or cinematic tricks at play. Is it the sheer lack of visible choreography that makes it so much more wrenching?
When you enter the enemy's world and live in it, can you avoid becoming like them? Can you continue to see them as targets, foes, rather than human beings? (Sigh... Ah, people...)

3. Can you fake love, or does the very act of acting like you’re in love inevitably shade into something like love?
How the hell did they make those sex scenes that freaking graphic, without just having the actors do it on camera? (Over here, I understand why Angie thought the sex scenes are extensive.)

4. How do you reconcile the true humanity you might see in the person right in front of you, in a moment of honest vulnerability, with that person's day job as a monster?
Does the fact that Ang Lee avoids the easy outs of showing us the brutality of the Japanese occupiers and their collaborationists--giving us barely a hint of what makes Leung's character so presumably vile--make it harder to answer that previous question?

5. Is his decision to start the story near the end, then do an extended flashback, merely a narrative trick to show us where the film is going, thus raising questions that insure our interest, or is it indicative of his take on his heroine, and in which life she’s most real?

6. Acting/masking/making up scenes through mirrors are all entwined together to reveal the themes Daphne has pointed out.

This is stuff I thought about in this movie.