Customer Reviews

Lust, Caution: The Story, the Screenplay, and the Making of the Film

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I read this book first in Chinese and then in English because I wanted to know how it was translated. Even for the Chinese reader Eileen Chang's original text could be hard to follow and necessitated rereading to fully grasp the details. Chang's writing is famously dense, lush, sensuous, and chock full of puns, symbolism and suggestion. She wrote with a vocabulary distinctive to her era and to her world. Her description of colors, for example, can be foreign to many contemporary Chinese readers. To translate her work will therefore inevitably strip the writing of that period flavor. Julia Lowell did an admirable job in presenting Chang's story in a very fluid and stylish manner in English, even if she could not adequately convey the mood that Chang evoked. In fact, it was easier to follow the plot by reading the English translation.

Unlike her other fiction pieces, Chang's Lust|Caution was extremely spare. Though Chang had always been precise and terse with her language she never spared details. In Lust|Caution, however, she seemed to have deliberately skipped some descriptions. Chang provided the motive for the two central characters to become drawn to each other: Chia-chih and Mr. Yee chose their diametrically opposite paths during Japan's invasion of China but in the process both ended up emotionally repressed, insecure, and isolated. This void drew them together, but Chang only informed the readers that they had become intimate twice without further details. This was unlike her other novels/novellas that at least briefly described the seduction (Red Rose, White Rose) or what the character was thinking as she got intimate with her lover (Love in a Fallen City). Such deliberate omissions added to the mystique of Chia-chih's impulsive and fateful decision at the end, leaving readers lingering with imagination and postulation long after they finished the story. For Chang's fans, in particular, we wonder if the conciseness stemmed from Chang's reluctance to delve into a personal wound that inspired the story.

I can recommend this expanded version of Lust, Caution to those who are interested in the adaptation of a novel to screenplay. It gives the reader insight into the mind of the seasoned screenwriter and how he goes about his work. I also found much information in the preface by director Ang Lee and the introduction by screenwriter James Schamus.

This book brings together the original story by Eileen Chang and its screenplay adaptation by Wang Hui Ling and James Shamus, as well as succinct pieces of thinking by director Ang Lee and screenwriter Shamus. For students of screenwriting, the comparison between source material and adaptation is fascinating - for one thing, the story is short but the film is long (but not 'too long'). More fascinating still is the examination in story and movie of how people can escape into a role that then becomes both stronger and more real than their 'real' selves. As a 'Resistance' story (here Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation in WWII Shanghai), it is perhaps implausible, but the setting is not the subject.