From Eileen Chang to Ang Lee: Lust/Caution ed. by Peng Hsiao-yen and Whitney Crothers Dilley (review)

Ang Lee’s espionage thriller Lust/Caution, adapted from a short story by Eileen Chang, inspired vociferous commentaries and heated debates upon its release in 2007. The present work assembles the latest critical responses to the film and its literary inspiration from scholars in Taiwan and internationally. In doing so, it offers rich insight on the process by which Lee brought Chang’s story to the screen as well as on the political controversies each artist provoked. Most contributors effectively incorporate a variety of modern critical approaches in their analysis of the themes of adaptation and betrayal, performance and identity, gender and sexuality, and power and manipulation. More importantly, some authors skillfully relate these themes to the complex historical and sociopolitical contexts of both sides of the Taiwan Strait as well as the rest of the globe.

The introductory chapter by the editors, Peng Hsiao-yen and Whitney Crothers Dilley, sets out by summarizing debates on eroticism, patriotism, and national identity that Lee’s film initiated, following up with a survey of the vicissitudes of twentieth-century Taiwanese politics. Despite the film’s setting in Mainland China during the Sino-Japanese War in the 1940s, and despite its transnational production and reach, they argue, “the uniquely Taiwanese national sensibilities and sentiments disclosed in Lust/Caution cannot be overlooked” (p. 4). Indeed, this sense of innately Taiwanese consciousness looms large, constituting one of the volume’s key concerns. Its remaining chapters are grouped into three parts.

Part 1 focuses on adaptation, examining the processes of adapting literature for film and basing fiction on historical events. The four articles it comprises present divergent, sometimes conflicting, views of adaption as translation, betrayal, transformation, or consumption. In chapter 1, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh proposes to go beyond the habitual concern with how faithfully a work has been adapted. Instead, invoking Julia Kristeva’s theory of “intertextuality,” she focuses on the interplay, dialectics, and tension between the film adaptation and its literary source. Yeh perceptively analyzes how Lee’s film translates what is essential yet implicit in Chang’s original story—the dialogue between caution and lust—by adding to it the alternate shots of a German shepherd (a symbol of caution) and the couple’s lovemaking.

Notably, Cecile Chu-chin Sun in chapter 2 uses the very schemata of fidelity and infidelity that Yeh seeks to circumvent. By her account, both the story and the film lack a convincing integration of the characters with the original historical event and context, resulting in textual incoherence. Sun goes on to fault the author and director for failing to offer “a clear conception of what they each want to convey in their works” (p. 36). Sun’s view, however, largely disregards the intrinsic value of ambivalence and ambiguity in literary and filmic creation. Her concluding remark that Lee “is not yet a director of wisdom on a grand scale” (p. 49) places her piece nearer to the realm of evaluative assertion than critical argument.

Chapter 3 argues that Ang Lee’s film has transformed a local Chinese story into one of global significance. Jon Eugene von Kowallis attributes the film’s warm reception in Europe to its valorization of love in a time of political and martial chaos. Specifically, he suggests that Europeans’ past experience with occupiers and puppet regimes disposed them to empathize with the characters’ plight.

Chapter 4, by Darrell William Davis, evinces an ambition to tackle a number of issues. These include the theme of Chang’s story, the sex scenes in Lee’s adaptation, cannibalism, and class. Davis manages to weave them all together with the thread of consumption, illustrating how Wang Jiazhi’s consumption allows her to pose as a bourgeois seductress, a performance that paradoxically consumes and cannibalizes her. Davis further argues that Ang Lee’s adaptation itself can be seen as a form...