Lust Caution:
This is a new film from Ang Lee, the Academy Award-winning director of Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. A startling erotic espionage thriller about the fate of an ordinary woman's heart, it is based on the short story by revered Chinese author Eileen Chang, and stars Asian cinema icon Tony Leung opposite screen newcomer Tang Wei.

After watching, I think much of it and It has haunted me these days.
I love this movie, not for its sex scenes, but for its perfect portray of figures, especially the woman (Wong Jia Zhi). The whole story seems like tedium, but the heart of person is surfy.
Many cinephiles are anticipating the explicit sexuality, and some of them even criticized Lust Caution as a blue movie, but, I was attached to that woman!!
Maybe it's hard to understand the roles in this movie without the Chinese background and specific life experience. It's not an erotic movie but a psychologic movie. It sculptures an ordinary woman's heart and how it changed from innocent to sophisticated, from vivid to desperate.
She (Wong) used her whole life to struggle with despair. As a college student, she admired the leader of the theatre troupe (Kuang) and followed him to be a part of this absurd and insane assassination to a top Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee. For success in this assassination, she start to play a game of emotional intrigue with a powerful political figure. She devoted herself to her character and also broken her innocent dream with Kuang. The scenario proceeds as scripted until an unexpectedly fatal twist spurs her to flee.
However, the game is not over. Several years later, she met Kuang in Shanghai and was asked to reprised her role again, this time she grew the hope for a new life again, and it leaded her to proceed. But after she realized her identity went to the limit, the preliminary hopes became the bubbles and disappeared in the crucial society, she was near to collapse until she really felt the real love, it is not from Kuang, or her father, but Yee, she was moved by Yee and realized his love at the last minute of the assassination. After conflict of sense and sensibility at that moment, she decided to save Yee's life by betraying her organization, in exchange for her last hope to get a life from Yee. but the result was unfortunately going to death! It's her destiny.
No matter how much Yee loved her, no matter Yee was so distressed, he had no other choice to dispose of an disclosured espionage.
With the advent of death, she didn't cry, because she was totally desperate with her life, there is no hope in her life to keep her desire to be alive.
It's sentimental to see this conclusion of Wong. She set up her hope every time ,but the crucial society brought her the life end.
Years to come Lust Caution will be studied and watched compulsively, it will strike debate among cinephiles of its worth. Most importantly it will be a film to be treasured, perhaps not by many, but by a very enlightened few who can really understand it.
I love this movie!!

Susan

Posted by International Students at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Feb. 7 is Chinese New Year which is now popularly known as Spring Festival!!
It starts from the Begining of Spring (the first of the twenty-four terms in coodination with the changes of Nature). The Chinese word is "Guo Nian". "Guo" means pass-over; "Nian" was originally the name of a beast that prey on people the night before the beginning of a new year.

The beast Nian had a very big mouth that would swallow a great many people with one bite. People were very scared. One day, an old man came to subdue Nian. He said, "I hear say that you are very capable, but can you swallow the other beasts of prey on earth instead of people ?" So, it did swallow many of the beasts of prey on earth that also scared people.

Now that Nian is gone and other beasts of prey also fled into forests, people begin to celebrate their peaceful life. Before the old man left, he had told people to put up red paper decorations on their windows and doors at each year's end and make a big noise to scare away Nian in case it came back again, because red is the color the beast feared the most.

From then on, the tradition of pass-over the conquest of Nian is carried on from generation to generation. The term "Guo Nian", which may mean "Subdue the Nian" becomes today "Celebrate the (New) Year".

At the night before the Chinese New Year, family will be together to celebrate the new year, and they eat the traditional Chinese Food-Dumpling and play the firecracker!!It is the happiest day for me when I was a child, as the children always can get the new stuffs as well as the money for a lunar New Year gift.
I love the dumpling made by my mother!!

Susan

Posted by International Students at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)