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by Nick Taylor
Happy Venice Film Festival, y’all!! While Nathaniel and Elisa are off in Italy enjoying some of the season’s hottest potential offerings, I figured it’d be fun to play along at home and finally watch some noteworthy Venice prizewinners I somehow hadn’t seen yet, or have been prioritizing for years but never gotten around to viewing.
And among the most urgent films for this tour was 2007’s Golden Lion winner Lust, Caution, Ang Lee’s story of espionage in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong across several years of World War II, dramatizing on-the-ground political stakes with an eye towards contemporaneous cinematic flourishes and the defining grit and elegance of ‘40s noir. The 1979 novella by Ellen Chang was infamous for supposedly extrapolating story elements from the life of Chinese spy Zheng Pingru. Lee’s film reignited those controversies while drawing some of its own, facing confusion about its country of production and earning an NC-17 rating that put it in hot water with numerous censorship laws.
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