Eileen Chang’s Lust, Caution is a taut story of suspense. The beginning of the story starts at a Mojang game, but as you know if you’ve read the novella, there’s much more going on than just that. The novella first establishes the game, describes the women, then contextualizes the setting of Japanese Occupied Shanghai and then allows the scene to play out as Mai Tai-Tai bickers with the entourage Yee Tai-Tai, the wife of an important military figure in the Japanese army, Mr. Yee. The conversation grows into something of a suspenseful ordeal as the women’s personal lives are laid out giving us more and more context, but also letting us know the thoughts of Mai Tai-Tai. The amount of information that is running through her mind, the intensity of her thought are represented through Chang’s writing. Her mind is not on the game, but on the little details that could eventually get her caught. As the previously inconspicuous, but still suspenseful start of the story spells itself out, suddenly, the line, “It was getting far too dangerous. If the job wasn’t done today, if the thing were to drag on any longer, Yee Tai Tai would surely find them out,” (Chang 11). The moment almost comes out of nowhere and the surprise adds suspense and context in both the sense that Mai Tai-Tai and Mr. Yee have become lovers and insinuating the reality that Mai Tai-Tai (whose name has also been mentioned as Chai-Chi) is, in fact, a spy, working with a group of insurgent students attempting to murder Mr. Yee. The novella spells out the moment easily using the rules of a novel. After setting up the context, it never focusses on the game and in doing so allows for the suspense of the wealth of detail that Mai Tai-Tai must keep in check, to keep the reader themselves on the edge of their seat.
How do you make that work on film though? Ang Lee’s adaptation of Chang’s work from 2007 is one of the best films ever made, but it begs the question as to how a director could capture the same suspense in the format of film. Lee can’t use the same techniques as Chang does, which brings us to what he can do. The film starts much like the novella, first contextualizing the time period as Japanese Occupied Shanghai. This establishes the setting, but it cannot establish the tone. As much as the men with guns tell us that this is a dangerous time, they can’t tell us what the story is about or the intimate emotions of our protagonist. Ang Lee, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and editor Tim Squyres are all up to that task. The scene we are looking at (let’s refer to it as the mahjong scene) runs approximately 9 minutes long and keeps us in suspense for that entire period of time. The scene begins with a servant bringing in food to the four women playing mahjong. For the next nine minutes, almost the entire time will be focussed on all these women, supposedly friends, but really in the game enemies, masking their contempt for each other and the intensity of the gamble by making small talk. Most of it is very unassuming, but Lee directs the sequence like an action scene. After the servant puts down the tray of food, we smash cut hard into the table where all the women are reaching in and organizing the tiles. The event seems mundane enough, but the transference from the moment of stillness, as the food sits there, to this moment of disorienting movement takes us by surprise. Also by the Kuleshov Effect, it almost gives the woman a ferocity as when juxtaposed with the previous frame of the food sitting, the women’s hands, create the illusion in our minds of them furiously clawing at the food, as much as they are clawing toward the mahjong tiles. From moment one, Lee has thrown off his audience. We understand that there is a suspenseful element to the scene, and that, much like Mai Tai-Tai in the book, we will have to be on our toes the entire time watching for this energy. Lee does something in the scene that not many directors do in such a close quarters activity. He goes in for a close-up of the table that is almost constantly moving. Not only is this disorienting (it too follows a frame that has some stillness to it), but it also allows for the energy of the game to be captured. As the camera whips across such a small space it seems to be building energy that becomes destructive because, after this quick movie, Lee pays off the energy by allowing us to become comfortable with the fluidity of it for a few seconds and then cutting again, halfway across the table, disorienting us further. The conversation has started by now and the women are out for blood. Lee is too. He draws us into the scene through allowing us to become comfortable with the established rules of the editing and camera and then he breaks them, disorienting us and putting us more on guard for when the next cut will come. It’s this continuing subversion of the editing and increased pacing of the scene (the cuts get faster and faster) that keeps the scene shooting forward. Just whenever Lee has you engaged through close-ups showing the woman speaking and giving each other quick contemptuous looks, he throws you a curveball and does a wide shot but not for too long. This wide shot then cuts even closer with the blurry profiles of one woman obscuring the face of another. Even without the dialogue, we can tell that there is an antagonism. Whip up, down, up, hard cut. Action, reaction all in the same shot as one woman in the game clenches a small victory. A continuous blend of elements that keeps the audience as much on its toes as Mai Tai-Tai must be. Handheld whips on the table. The cutting gets faster, the women’s faces are easier to see, and then back to a wide shot. Words are personified by camera movement, punching toward the characters. This isn’t just a game of wits. This is a brutal fight. There is only one disruption to the scene, a lengthy one where Mr. Yee exits a torture chamber and is driven home, returning to the women. It lasts approximately a minute and a half. It serves as a lengthy break from the suffocatingly small space of the women’s mahjong game. The film is almost teasing us here, showing the results for any spy going against the Japanese, but also drawing us out the game, obscuring our view from it, leaving us with questions as to what will happen? Then Yee enters the scene he seems to dominate it. The women spend most of their time either looking down at the table away from him or up at him and he’s always looking straight down on them. It’s a moment of great intensity as the woman continue to play. Suddenly, having shared an exchange in a glance with Mr. Yee, Mai Tai-Tai excuses herself. When she says what she needs to the hands in the middle stop dead. She has to leave, but there’s something further going on. Something more intense. So intense that the energy of the scene, the moving hands of the four women, suddenly comes to a standstill. This is effectively the end of the scene as it returns for about a minute to its normal roller coaster of editing. Lust, Caution as described above is a story about the intensity of the little details. The climax moment of the film comes from a moment that is quite subtle, in both the book and the film as Mai Tai-Tai for just a moment breaks her cover to warn her love, Mr. Yee, that he needs to run. This opening scene of the woman all talking and playing mahjong was as an intense start to the film, capturing the pressure on a woman ready to take part in an assassination of the only person she feels passion with, with only the movements of the camera and the editing. It’s a masterclass of filmmaking and a showcase for how the suspense of this novella can be transferred into film so authentically. Bibliography:
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AuthorStephen Tronicek. Archives
July 2017
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