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Published on Saturday 29 December 2007 13:49

Film reviews

LUST, CAUTION (18) ****

Director: Ang Lee

Running time: 158 minutes

FOR Ang Lee, love is anticipation wrapped in fear. His last film, the gay cowboy romp, Brokeback Mountain, was an examination of two men trapped ecstatically on the bull-horns of a dilemma. Lust, Caution takes their discomfiture and multiplies it.

The director's first Chinese film since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000 is based on a short story by Eileen Chang and focuses on the brutal, cruel relationship between the young, idealistic and inexperienced Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei) and Mr Yee (Tony Leung), the ruthless head of the security services in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942.

It would be misleading to call this a love story, as for most of the film Mak Tai Tai is attempting to win her way into Mr Yee's affections so that he can be assassinated by her friends. Mr Yee, meanwhile, is a veteran of several such plots, and treats romantic assignations as an excuse to practise 57 varieties of sadism, some of which are quite surprising in a mainstream cinematic release. The sex, when it comes, is explicit, gymnastic and instructive. It is also soaked with fear and dread, and the sense that both of the participants really want to kill each other.

But we are ahead of ourselves already. The sex is one thing, the anticipation is another. Ang Lee is very good at lust, but most of this film is about the caution. (There has been debate about the translation of the title, as in Shanghainese, "lust" and "lost" are closely related.)

In fact, the opening scenes are reminiscent of Ang Lee's Sense And Sensibility. When we first meet Mak Tai Tai she is playing mahjong – a game with the appearance of dominoes – in the guarded compound of the collaborationist government. The game is hosted by Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen), the wife of Mr Lee, who arrives home from a hard day's torturing to share a fateful glance with Mak Tai Tai. The moment is almost imperceptible, but the director's choreography is so precise that it arrives like a gunshot. The action then switches back to the scene in which Mak Tai Tai (at this point called Wong Chia Chi) enlists in the assassination plot.

Her involvement begins at university, where she joins a theatre group and nurses a crush on the troupe's director, Kuang Yu Min (Wang Lee-Hom). She is a convincing actress, and when Kuang moves into political activity, she follows him. The first attempt to win her way into Mr Lee's affections is tortuously tentative. She accompanies him to a tailor's to have a suit fitted, and models a dress, causing the customary blankness of Leung's face to soften. They have a meal together, and the interrogator fires questions at the innocent seductress. The sense of doubt remains: are the questions because he doubts her credentials, or because he is genuinely fascinated? His interest in the lipstick smudge on her wine glass suggests that lust is triumphing over caution.

Yet, when Mr Lee is tempted back to the house where the student assassins lie in wait, he refuses to cross the threshold. Since both Mr Lee and Mak Tai Tai are playing roles within roles, it is impossible to tell whether his caution is a matter of good sense or good manners, but it soon becomes clear to the would-be assassins that they lack the expertise to complete their task.

The dance is resumed three years later, when Kuang enlists Mak Tai Tai to a more practised wing of the resistance. She is hardened, and the politics have grown more brutal. In Shanghai, the corpses are being loaded on to carts, and a screening of the Cary Grant film Penny Serenade is interrupted by a propaganda reel proclaiming "Asia is returning to the Asians".

Shall we get down to it? Mak Tai Tai is driven to an address. It is raining. She goes into the bedroom. There is thunder. She closes the French windows, and emits an animal yelp when she sees Mr Lee sitting in the shadows, legs crossed. He lights a cigarette. She pushes her leg over his. He grabs her neck. "My hair!" she screams. "You playing hard to get?" he replies. Still it is raining. She takes off her stockings. He grabs her face and rips at her clothes like a beast, pushing her on to the bed. He throws his wallet down and hits her with his belt, then ties her hands behind her back.

The sex is bad. The sex is good. It is Gone With The Wind directed by Jack Vettriano. It will end, you know, with bruises, and regret. It's beautifully done, and in an area where timing is important, Ang Lee disports himself immaculately.

On general release from Friday

Polaroids of an American dream

ALICE IN THE CITIES (U) ****

Director: Wim Wenders

Running time: 110 minutes

IN HIS last film, 2005's Don't Come Knocking, Wim Wenders collaborated with Sam Shepard in an attempt to examine the fantasy of America, with Shepard playing a cowboy actor who runs from a world of dumb money. On paper it looked great. Wenders and Shepard worked together on Paris, Texas, a masterpiece of loneliness and alienation. But Don't Come Knocking failed to gel and gave the impression of a director who had lost sight of his obsession.

Alice In The Cities was made in 1974 when Wenders was at the forefront of the New German Cinema. It has never been properly released in the UK, and looking at it now is an act of poetic archaeology. All of Wenders' concerns are apparent – he jokingly referred to them as "the Three As": alienation, angst and America – but time has done something dramatic to the imagery. The America that Wenders and his cameraman Robby Muller captured now looks like a forgotten dream.

Like many of Wenders' films, it is a road movie. The hero of Alice In The Cities, Philip Winter (Rdiger Vogler) is a German journalist whose attempt to write an article about the US has induced writer's block. Instead of capturing the country in words, he takes Polaroids of the marginal spaces he inhabits: piers, diners, motels, highways, gas stations and industria. Everywhere is nowhere.

The first spoken words of the film come when a kid asks him what he is taking pictures for. He replies: "Talking to yourself. That's actually more like speaking."

Allusions to filmmaking, and its contribution to the myth of America, abound. In a motel room, Winter is watching John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln when the action is interrupted by commercials. He responds by smashing the TV. Later he complains that "all programmes become commercials for the status quo".

Winter runs out of money, so he tries to fly home to Germany, only to be thwarted by an airport strike. There he meets a woman (Lisa Kreuzer) who is trying to fly home to Germany with her daughter Alice (Yella Rottlnder, inset).

The three of them end up spending a night in a New York hotel room, but when Philip wakes, the woman has gone, leaving Alice behind. Man and child form an unlikely friendship as he takes her back to Europe, hoping that her mother will reappear.

It's a matter of regret that some aspects of the relationship between man and child now feel slightly worrying, but that doesn't detract from the sincerity of Wenders' vision, or his disappointment at the unreliability of long-distance information.

On general release from Friday

A dead letter day for Hilary

PS I LOVE YOU (12A) **

Director: Richard LaGravenese

Running time: 126 minutes

HILARY Swank is good at many things, but a measure of her charms can be gleaned from the fact that her success at the Oscars has come in roles where she was not traditionally feminine. In Boys Don't Cry, she played a girl pretending to be a boy. Quite convincingly, as it turned out. And in Million Dollar Baby, she played a girl who was tough enough to melt the granite heart of boxing trainer Clint Eastwood. That film's subtitle might have been Girls Don't Punch. In both films, Swank was tough and vulnerable, and secretly pretty.

Well, you can see how that would get a girl down. PS I Love You is Swank's entry into conventional femininity, being a hardcore romcom in which Hilary gets to explore the more traditional female virtues.

Swank plays Holly, a woman whose great good fortune it is to be in love with Gerry (oor ain Gerard Butler), a great clunking coal shovel of a man whose every waking breath is defined by his Irishness. This is not Irishness as most of encounter it: it is the Oirishness of the American-Oirish, who wear kilts to spectate on police pipe bands before going river-dancing to a corner bar to drink Guinness and share memories of the homeland they have never visited.

Gerry, then, is an old sod from the old sod, whose Irishness is expressed in his garrulousness (volume in place of charisma) and his habit of bursting into song at the slightest provocation. His relationship with Holly is tempestuous. Their arguments never begin or end, though they do occasionally desist from shoe-throwing for an ameliorative cuddle.

Anyway, Gerry dies. He is deceased, gone from his perch, an ex-Oirishman. Holly, being a girl's girl, does not dust herself down and enjoy the silence, but spirals instead into self-destructive grief, which tries the patience of her old boot of a mother (Kathy Bates), and her girly girlfriends Sharon (Gina Gershon) and Denise (Lisa Kudrow). She stops tidying her apartment and has hallucinations which suggest Gerry is still around. This impression is encouraged by the fact that he keeps sending her letters.

There is, in this scenario, the kernel of a good idea. In Under The Sand, Charlotte Gainsbourg explored the blurred realities of grief to moving effect. But PS I Love You is in love with romance, a condition in which grief is only a matter of punctuation, and chooses to ignore the creepier aspects of its scenario.

Most widows, on receiving a birthday cake and a tape recording from their dead husband urging them to go out and celebrate themselves would contact Interpol. Swank accepts the gift, and thus risks alienating her girly girlfriends, and scaring off the still-breathing man who finds her attractive while suffering from a variety of Tourette's which forces him to tell the unflattering truth at all times.

Girls, I fear, will like this stuff. Men may wish to follow Gerry's example and get out while the going is merely bad.

On general release from Friday

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I AM LEGEND

Will Smith furthers his all-American hero status with this stylish thriller, which doesn't hide the fact it is influenced by 28 Days Later, as he wanders a New York city which has been deserted following a mystery plague.

THE KITE RUNNER

Marc Forster (Finding Neverland) directs Khaled Hosseini's bestseller about boyhood friendship in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion of Kabul in 1978.

I'M NOT THERE

It shouldn't work, but it does. Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Christian Bale etc act out the 'idea of Dylan' in this inventive biopic which is loaded with metaphor and myth. All on release now