Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Lust, Caution
2007 · Ang Lee · Lust, Caution on Sightlines
Four women at a mahjong table, and the camera keeps finding their hands. Tiles come down with a clack. The chatter is rings, rents, who is eating well under the occupation. Nothing in the scene moves the plot an inch, and the scene is the whole war: who owes whom, who is watching, who has been seated one place nearer to power. Rodrigo Prieto shoots the table as a grid and sets Wong Chia Chi inside it the way he sets her inside every room in this film, framed by a doorway, halved by a mirror, fixed in place by other people's furniture. Deleuze called the film frame a closed set, a composition to be read as a system rather than a view. Lee's closed sets are upholstered. That is what makes them hard to leave.
Ang Lee's specific invention here is a piece of casting with an argument inside it. He gave the central role to Tang Wei, a drama-school graduate with almost no screen experience, and asked her to play an amateur actress sustaining an impossible performance for years. The performer's problem and the character's are one problem. The rest of the film follows from that.
It is a spy story in which none of the spying works. Deleuze's term for classical cinema is the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, acts, and the act changes it. He argued that this machinery seized up after the war, and called the seizure the crisis of the action-image, where people can no longer respond adequately to what they see. Watch the students' first killing. It runs long and goes badly, too many hands and the wrong tools, and Tim Squyres declines to hand you the clean elision the genre has offered forever. That is Lee's debt to Army of Shadows, which turned the murder of a collaborator into a long piece of domestic awkwardness. The scene isn't suspense. It's a sensory-motor circuit failing in front of you: students who see an enemy clearly and cannot make their bodies finish the sentence.
What grows in place of action is a crystal. Deleuze's crystal-image, the hyalosign, is an image where a thing and its reflection change places too fast to sort out — the role and the person, the stage and the life, each founding the other until asking which came first stops being useful. This film shows you the seed. Wong is established early as someone susceptible to fiction, moved in the dark of a movie house and moved further by an amateur patriotic stage, where students discover that playing a thing feels no different from being it. Deleuze called that the crystal in formation, a seed dropped into solution. The whole operation grows out of it. A student troupe invents a woman called Mrs. Mak, and one of them moves in.
The body carries the rest. Deleuze's gest is a posture that makes a social relation visible with no one explaining it: how people sit, hold, defer, arrange themselves for each other. The mahjong table is a gest, four pairs of hands performing leisure while conducting surveillance. So is the sex, staged contorted and uncomfortable and shot with the same rigor as the interrogations. That's the argument rather than the provocation: the same work is being done in the bedroom that the regime does in its cells. Focus Features accepted an NC-17 instead of cutting. They were right. Trimming those scenes doesn't cool the film down, it removes its thesis.
A second crystal is rotting alongside. Deleuze found in Visconti a world in decomposition, ordered and beautiful and going bad from the inside while the surfaces hold. Tony Leung plays the collaborationist official against his own charisma, a man whose power has hollowed him into fear. Joan Chen plays the wife keeping a household running on a lie she isn't permitted to see. The tailoring is immaculate. Desplat's strings supply the yearning nobody in these rooms may speak, and then Lee takes the music away and leaves you with tiles and rain, where the strain actually lives.
Then the crack. Renoir's crystals, in Deleuze's reading, carry a flaw through which someone slips out into life. Lee builds one and makes it lethal. Everything narrows to the jeweler's shop and the pink diamond, the ambush in position outside, and Tang Wei's face doing the one thing a face can still do: small movements gathering toward a threshold, feeling with nowhere to discharge. Deleuze's name for such a face is an icon of power. She breaks the crystal from inside. The mission collapses at the moment it succeeds, and the way out opens onto nothing. Lee never explains the choice, and the refusal is exact. A self performed into existence is still a self, and at the end it is the one deciding.
Which is where Deleuze's forger belongs. His forger isn't a liar but a maker, someone who produces a truth by inventing it and then living inside the invention. Wong is one. So is the cell: students with no resistance to join, legending themselves into an organization that doesn't exist. Deleuze called this fabulation, and reserved it for people who invent an identity ahead of the collective that would have given them one. These students perform a nation's courage in a theater, and the performance turns real enough to get them killed.
The lineage is legible, and Lee knows it. Notorious is the template, a woman handled by an intelligence service into the enemy's bed, and Lee shifts its center of gravity. Hitchcock keeps the agony with the handler who loves the asset he is prostituting, and grants a rescue at the end; here the handler is a student with no apparatus behind him, and the rescue runs backwards, because she saves the target. The Conformist supplies the occupation melodrama assembled out of masks and the wish to belong, staged in lacquered period rooms. Raise the Red Lantern supplies the logic Lee moves to the mahjong table: confinement rendered as ritual interiors and games of position among women. From Center Stage and Farewell My Concubine he takes Chinese-language cinema's great structure, the performer whose assumed role eats the private self, compressed here from decades into a few years and one borrowed name.
What the film sent forward is easier to name as a permission than as a list of titles: explicit sex made structurally load-bearing in a prestige period picture, and made so rigorously that cutting it breaks the story. The confirmation arrived from outside the film. Mainland China released it substantially shortened, then effectively barred Tang Wei from domestic media and advertising — a state punishing a performer for what a character did. The censors couldn't find the seam either. They made Lee's case for him.
Watch it again for hands. Watch the doorways she stands inside. And notice exactly where Desplat stops.
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Tang Wei 'must play a woman playing a woman — an amateur actress sustaining a fabricated identity — and calibrate the slippage between the two until neither she nor the audience can locate the seam.'
- crystal in formation (the seed) — 'the cocoon of the movie theater and the amateur stage, which established Wong's fatal susceptibility to being moved by fiction' — the student troupe's invented identity grows from that seed.
- cracked crystal — 'the jeweler's shop and the pink-diamond ring that becomes the story's pivot'; 'the mission collapses at the moment of its success' — the fissure through which she escapes the role, onto nothing.
- crystal-decomposition — Leung as an official 'whose power has hollowed him into fear,' Joan Chen as the confined, oblivious wife, inside dense period surfaces of 'scarcity and privilege in a divided city.'
- crisis of the action-image — 'an early amateur killing that is agonizingly protracted and clumsy, editorially refusing the clean elisions of the genre'; Lee 'empties the spy story of its usual pleasures — competence, momentum, catharsis.'
- the gest — The mahjong table 'where women's chatter masks surveillance and rivalry'; sex scenes 'contorted and often uncomfortable rather than voluptuous... extensions of the interrogation and power-play.'
- the closed set (cadre) — Prieto 'favors compositions that trap Wong within frames-inside-frames — doorways, mirrors, the grid of the mahjong table — visually stating her confinement inside a role.'
- icon of power (threshold face) — Tang Wei's 'interior transparency about self-annihilation' held on her face at the jeweler's-shop pivot, where the whole plot turns without an action.
- the forger — Wong Chia Chi sustaining the fabricated Mrs. Mak; the film presents her final choice as 'the logical terminus of a self she has performed into existence.'
- fabulation (legending) — 'A troupe of patriotic Hong Kong university students, radicalized into amateur assassins' by way of the amateur patriotic stage — a resistance invented in performance before it exists.