Overview
watch the film and incorporate with the reading to write a review about 350 words
film: In the mood for love, 2000, Wong kar-wai
reading: Bugsley, petter C 2015, 'visual decorum and chasteness in chineses film' in exploring morality and sexuality in Asian cinema, pp 41-73
review example:
Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" (2007) is a cinematographic adaptation of a short story of the same name by the veteran Taiwanese author Eileen Chang, but greatly expanding and fleshing out the narrative frame and detail from Chang's slender and impressionistic, dream-like narration. The film takes place in Hong Kong and Shanghai during the Japanese invasion of China in World War II, roughly between 1937 and 1939, and tells the story of the involvement of an idealistic and politically driven student who has lost most of her family, Wang Jiazhi, with an important official in the collaborationist puppet regime set up by the Japanese, one Mr. Yee, a ruthless and yet deeply scarred man. Wang Jiazhi is recruited by the Chinese resistance movement to pose as a well-to-do businesswoman in order to seduce Yee and therefore facilitate a planned assassination to be carried out by members of the resistance movement. Yet things do not go as planned as Wang Jiazhi realizes that she has been utilized by all the men in her life except Yee, and that her sexual affair with him has, against her own will and her own political convictions, crept into her emotional world. The film makes specific references to a classic of Chinese cinema that deals with similar topics, Yuan Muzhi's 1937 "Street Angel," made exactly during the action of "Lust, Caution," by reusing some of the songs in the 1937 film and especially through the lively recreation of the slums of Shanghai in the early 20th Century. The film excels at depicting the internal conflict of Wang Jiazhi between her Confucian commitment to her country, very much in line with traditional Chinese morality and embodied in the ideals of the resistance movement, and her own individual emotions, along with the disenchantment that emerges upon realizing that, politics and ideology apart, there are few chances for a woman alone in a world controlled by men.