MovieChat Forums > Se, jie (2007) Discussion > Anti-climatic

Anti-climatic

posted 13 years ago by max213
3 replies | jump to latest

This has to be the most Anti-climatic movie i've ever seen!

Show a pretty girl a very expensive ring with a massive rock on it and she goes against everything she has gone through the previous 3+ years.

The movie spends well over two hours building up.. and up... and BAM! give her a ring and all is forgotten, she confesses to him, and it ends in a whimper.

Give me a break, what a load of nonsense. Did she just forget what she has had to endure? the tales of murder and torture this guy tells her about?

Oh and the sex scenes were too graphic for this type of movie, they should have been filmed far more gracefully.

[–] LLOwens 13 years ago

The movie spends well over tow hours building up...

Wei Tang spoke in a monotonous tone until 1:55 in the film when she for a brief moment showed pretty good range in the higher end of the spectrum. I'd just wish she would have had more emotional outbursts interspersed throughout instead of having it climax four-fifths the way through--then fizzling out for the final half hour. I must admit that despite weaknesses such as this--I did enjoy this film--it's just that it could have been much more compelling than a mostly one-note performance by its lead Wei Tang.

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[–] Elisabet Jonsson 12 years ago

But don't you think the film depicts how Chinese women were regarded and used in the 1930s and 40s? By both sides. Expendable. Not able to speak up for themselves. That's my interpretation of the film anyway.

[–] rzajac 10 years ago

Max,

Well, in a way, that's the point. You're supposed to metabolize that as tragedy, not travesty. I think you may be *imposing* "type" on the movie ("...for this type of movie, ..."). Lee An (apparently) was unable to convince you of the "type" of movie he had in mind. That's OK. It may explain why the flick has been passed over by a lot of reviewers, yet makes me cry, like clockwork, at the end, every time I view it.

Personally, I enjoy "types" of movies--and have little toolkits of criteria for assessing their efficacy in fulfilling the demands of their respective "types"--but also sit up and take notice when filmmakers exert themselves and stun with a flick that (for me) successfully evades type. Lee An said (in interviews) that the story by Eileen Chang drove his esthetic. When you let short-story writers drive your directoral/storyboarding/production decisions, you're certainly asking for trouble. The question with Se/Jie (Lust/Caution) is whether Lee succeeded in delivering the goods that he felt so deeply as he read the short-story.

In short: The sex scenes may have been too graphic for the "type" of movie you figured it was supposed to have been, but they might *not* have been too graphic for the type of movie it *was*. Maybe you need to reapproach the flick from that perspective.

--
And I'd like that. But that 5h1t ain't the truth. --Jules Winnfield