It’s not often you can define the tone of an event before it’s even started but the 64th Venice Film festival has certainly managed to bring up some pointers about the state of filmmaking today. It began last night with the premiere of Atonement, a classy and assured period drama, based on Ian McEwan’s novel of betrayal and remorse, starring Keira Knightley and James McEvoy as wartime lovers whose lives are ruined by the actions of a jealous sister. It was an easy choice for the festival, given its love of female stars, but many were taken aback by the sometimes brilliant direction by Joe Wright, whose technical prowess came as a revelation even to the nay-sayers who thought Pride And Prejudice was just an average middle-brow Britlit art flick.
With its themes of deception, manipulation and intrigue, Atonement set the scene for Ang Lee’s hotly anticipated Lust, Caution, a ravishing period piece set in occupied Shanghai and starring Tang Wei as a drama student named Wong who becomes involved with a political plot to undermine the Japanese. Posing as a rich socialite, she joins the mah jong-playing social elite surrounding the wife of local turncoat Mr Yee (Tony Leung) and flirts with him in a bid to get him alone, thereby priming him for assassination.
That’s pretty much all that happens, and after a perhaps unnecessarily long prelude – rumours suggest this isn’t the release cut and may be trimmed – Lee’s film reveals itself as a slow but fascinating drama, consciously evoking Hitchcock’s Notorious and giving it an Eastern candour not see since Oshima’s sexually explicit In The Realm Of The Senses.
Like Mr Yee himself, the sex scenes are a long time coming and just as dark as one might expect, given its NC-17 rating in the US. Reflecting Yee’s sadism and insecurity, twinned with Wong’s selfless masochism as she dangles herself ever more recklessly as bait, these scenes are hard to describe:
passionate, disturbing and exhausting, never mind gymnastic. It’s no Brokeback Mountain but there may be some awards action for this challenging and rewarding film, principally for Tang Wei and Lee but also for its script (by Eileen Chang and James Schamus) and score (by Alexandre Desplat).
Ultimately this is a strong and provocative film about women and how they survive in a male-dominated society. For a film about men, you could frankly do much better than Sleuth, a ropey two-hander starring Michael Caine as a Wilbur Smith-style novelist who invites his wife’s lover over for a game of cat and mouse. Like Atonement and Lust, Caution – and the well-intentioned but never great George Clooney thriller Michael Clayton, which screens on Friday – this is a film about agendas, with Caine and Law turning the tables on each other so often it becomes a headache trying to figure out whose table it is anyway and which way it was facing in the first place. Caine plays his part well and comes out on top of Harold Pinter’s sometimes awkward script. Jude Law doesn't fare quite as well but to explain why will ruin the film completely so you'll just have to take our word for it.
Damon Wise