Lust, Caution: don't try this at home

The sexual gymnastics in a new film by Ang Lee(李安) have shocked the Chinese censors. Richard Spencer takes a peek.(附带部分中文注释)
I was once told a story by a local councillor that I enjoyed so much I never dared to check whether it was true. Among other duties, my friend sat on the committee that vetted films before they were distributed to local cinemas.

He insisted it was a duty he took seriously, and that it was not just a chance to watch dirty movies for free. In fact, he said, all community groups were properly represented, so among his colleagues were a deaf man and an elderly blind woman, who formed a team. They would sit together at the front of the cinema and the deaf man would describe to his neighbour – slightly too loudly – what was going on.

"She's taking off her bra!" he would shout, as the film approached its climax. Then, booming out of the darkness: "Now he's stroking her breast!"

I wonder what the good aldermen would make of Lust, Caution, the latest masterpiece by Ang Lee, Oscar-winnng director of hits such as Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain.

Across Asia, L,C is taking cinemas and pirate DVD shops by storm. A spy thriller set in 1940s Shanghai after the Japanese invasion, it is based on a story by one of China's favourite novelists, Eileen Chang(张爱玲), and, with the subtlety we associate with Lee, delves into the unexpected emotions triggered when will and loyalty collide.

But that is not why everyone is flocking to see it. The excitement largely concerns seven sexually explicit minutes at the heart of the film, when the heroine, a Chinese patriot who is seducing(引诱) a secret police chief and Japanese collaborator with a view to arranging his assassination, is bouleversé by his passionate, not to say violent, sexual exploits.

Screen shots of Tang Wei(汤唯), the Chinese ingenue picked by Lee to play the lead, and Tony Leung(梁朝伟), the well-established Hong Kong heart-throb playing her enemy, erotic mentor and, finally, lover, are now occupying the same role for teenage boys throughout Asia that Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke did 20 years ago in 9½ Weeks.

Not quite all of Asia, though. The reaction to the film in mainland China has neatly captured an awkward moment in the "opening up" of the People's Republic.

This is a country in the throes of a sexual revolution, where prostitution is so rife that I was once propositioned at the door of my son's Taekwondo(跆拳道) club, and where two sex shops recently opened within 100 yards of my house, one next door to a shop selling Buddhist votive offerings(佛教用品). But the censor has decided that in Lust, Caution, the lust had to go.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television sat down with Ang Lee and, like the blind councillor, painstakingly went through the seven minutes and cut every one.

But what if someone managed to get hold of a DVD of the uncut version? Best be, well… cautious. A doctor publicly warned viewers saying, in effect: "Don't try this at home." The gymnastics that Tang performs were too complicated, said Dr Yu Zaoze, for the ordinary man and wife (or mistress) in the hutong.

"Most of the sexual manoeuvres(性姿势) in Lust, Caution are abnormal body positions," he said. "Only women with comparatively flexible bodies that have gymnastics or yoga experience are able to perform them. For average people to blindly copy them could lead to unnecessary physical harm."

If you think it a little odd for a censor to allow a film about sex to be shown, but without any of the sex, you are not alone: one man is trying to sue the government for depriving him of his rightful enjoyment of the movie.(这大概指董彦斌同学吧，参考这里)

But then, this is China and his chances are not high: the same censors cut all the scenes showing the Chinese actor Chow Yun-fat(周润发) from Pirates of the Caribbean 3(加勒比海盗3) on the grounds that it hurt the nation's image for its people to see a Chinese pirate.

They were unconcerned that the film was a fantasy, all of whose protagonists(主角) were pirates, and which recruited Chow specifically because the first two films had been so popular among Chinese audiences.

Caution – with the Lust restored – is now on its way to a cinema near you. The doctor is right about not trying it at home, by the way – not that I've tried. Apart from anything else, Tang Wei has the figure of a standard Chinese woman brought up on tofu and spinach. Even svelte Western women here wear XL.
源自：telegraph.co.uk