Lust lost in (Beijing's) translation
By Kent Ewing

HONG KONG - It is ironic that Beijing's latest campaign to turn the world's most populous country into a sexless nation coincides with the release across Asia of Ang Lee's award-winning film, Lust, Caution, which takes eroticism to new heights in Chinese-language cinema.

While Lee's co-stars - veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai and film ingenue Tang Wei from the mainland - engage in sexual calisthenics for packed audiences in cinema houses throughout the region, China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) is busy banning advertisements for women's underwear. The problem, it seems, is the targeted lingerie's provocative selling point: propping up sagging tops and reining in expanding middles.

The ban also includes products that claim to improve sexual performance, sexual toys and "inelegant images" - whatever that might mean - in ads for "adult products". "Illegal 'sexual medication' advertisements and other harmful ads pose a grave threat to society," warned the SARFT notice.

This latest salvo from the broadcast watchdog is the continuation of a campaign against sex and violence on the airwaves that started this past summer and has since gathered steam. Last month, SARFT ordered 11 radio shows off the air in southern and central China for broadcasting content that, at its worst, the agency described as of an "extreme pornographic nature". In addition, the watchdog censured two radio stations in Sichuan province for airing programs of "indescribably squalid, erotic, and indecent content".

Television shows about cosmetic surgery have also been axed, as have American-Idol-style talent shows, apparently because regulators are rattled by the mass voting, via mobile phones and the Internet that they encourage,

In the minds of the Chinese leadership, all this censorship is an admirable effort to clean up the country's airwaves ahead of the all-important 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, to be held October 15 in Beijing. After all, when President Hu Jintau and Premier Wen Jiabao are re-anointed by the congress for another five years as the country's dynamic duo, they want the nation's collective mind focused on patriotism and purity, not lingerie and lust.

And then along comes Lee's movie, which won the Gold Lion award for best picture at the Venice Film Festival last month, to remind us that Chinese people have sex, too. In fact, they can be spectacularly good at it - although in Lee's dark and perverse tale the lovers' cries of ecstasy and union are snarled in a complex web of war-time suspicion and sadomasochism whose violence can be shocking.

The film's brutal honesty stands in sharp contrast to SARFT's see-no-sex, hear-no-sex approach. So it is no surprise to learn that, on the mainland, Lust, Caution will be shown without the steamy, sometimes violent sex - which, in another irony, will render the film virtually meaningless.

But don't get the wrong idea. Lust, Caution is a long film - some critics complain, at 158 minutes, too long - but only about 10 minutes of it takes place in the bedroom. That 10 minutes, however, is key to understanding the kinky underside of what is otherwise a routine spy story.

Set mostly in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the early 1940s, the film tells the story of how an innocent student named Wong Chia Chi (Tang) comes to be the seductive part of an assassination plot targeting a Mr Yee (Leung), an apostate who is collaborating with the Japanese as an intelligence chief.

Like Lee's last film - Brokeback Mountain, an ultimately tragic tale of gay love between two American cowboys for which he was awarded best director at the 2005 Academy Awards - Lust, Caution is born of a short story that gripped his imagination and took him into new and equally daring sexual terrain. In making Brokeback Mountain, Lee's camera lingered over the poetry of the Wyoming landscape described in Annie Proulx's story but presented the sex with restraint and discretion.

Lust, Caution also soaks in the styles and atmosphere of Hong Kong and Shanghai in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but where Eileen Chang, famed author of the story on which the film is based, only hints at the darkly erotic, Lee decides to depict it in excruciating detail.

The first sex scene between Leung and Tang does not come until the movie is more than 100 minutes old. That the scene borders on rape is disturbing enough, but this is a rape in which the victim - Tang as spy - appears to have triumphed. Other scenes that follow, featuring contortions beyond the Kama Sutra, make it impossible to distinguish between pain and pleasure or love and loathing in a relationship that has taken on all the complexity of the occupation and war that serve as its context.

Lee, 52, a native of Taiwan who has lived, studied and worked in the US for nearly 30 years, shot the scenes over 11 days on a closed set before he was satisfied. He has admitted, however, that he had qualms about using them.

"I first thought there was no way to make this short story into a film because there are many things in the story that Chinese would consider as immoral, such as sexual suggestions," he said. "It depicted the dark side of the heroic deeds, things we would feel uncomfortable with." But, in the end, he felt that making the film was "my destiny ... I decided to face it".

That said, Lee's destiny will be somewhat compromised when Lust, Caution is shown on the mainland. To please Chinese censors, he has agreed to cut out the sex and violence. The Category III rating for the film in Hong Kong allows admission to no one under the age of 18, but the mainland does not have a ratings system, so any film shown there must be considered acceptable for all ages.

Audiences are flocking to see Lust, Caution in Hong Kong - where the film earned an unprecedented US$474,000 in its first three days - and in Taiwan, where it took in a record-breaking $1.07 million in the same time frame. Not as much interest is expected in the US because the film has been given the country's most restrictive NC-17 (no one under 17) rating, which is usually associated with pornography. Also, critics say the film's length and the fact that it is mostly in Mandarin with English subtitles will discourage American audiences.

On the mainland, however, you can count on mountains of interest, and it is too bad mature audiences there will not be allowed to view the film as it was intended to be seen by one of the world's most gifted directors, who happens to be Chinese. With the pulsing passion of the story lying on the censor's floor, those audiences are likely to be left scratching their heads at the film's end.

They are also no doubt scratching their heads over ludicrous bans on advertisements for push-up bras and other forms of figure-enhancing underwear. Indeed, Chinese officialdom seems to be the last bastion of moral prudishness in a country whose people have never been more liberal in their attitudes toward sex. These looser sexual mores come as a predictable consequence of China's great economic boom and rising incomes, especially in the cities.

Now it is time for the government to also loosen up. Yes, this will lead to ads for scanty lingerie, sex toys, sex aids and more. That is the inevitable downside of sexual openness. On the upside, however, such a campaign can dispel deep-seated ignorance and lead to more responsible attitudes about sex.

How can you properly address sexually related problems without dialogue? For example, prostitution is illegal, yet commonplace, in China. Let's talk about it. And, certainly, let's talk about great films and great literature - sex and all.

Kent Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong International School. He can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk.