Lust, Caution
The MPAA thinks Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” has too much lust, and it’s cautioning moviegoers by branding it with an NC-17 rating.
Distributor Focus Features said it won’t edit the Oscar-winning Lee’s follow-up to “Brokeback Mountain” or try to appeal the rating — which says that no one 17 and under will be admitted — creating potential distribution problems for its awards-season contender.
“Lust” follows a young Chinese woman in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II who becomes the center of a plot to seduce and kill a married enemy collaborator. The trailer for the subtitled Chinese-language film shows lead actors Tony Leung and Tang Wei in various states of writhing passion.
The MPAA ratings board cited the film’s graphic sexuality for its decision. A source said too many of the film’s sex scenes violated the ratings board’s unwritten rules (like the number of allowable pelvic thrusts, for example) to make an appeal possible.
Sources who have seen the film said it contains at least three scenes — one a long montage — featuring multiple acts of aggressive sexual activity in different positions. There’s no full-frontal male nudity (the source of some NC-17 rulings when shown in sex scenes), but male-on-female oral sex, non-S&M restraints and several nontraditional sexual positions are depicted, conveying the aggression and emotional conflict between the main characters.
Major props to Focus Features for not turning around and censoring the film. The cynical side of me wonders if this would happen if Lust, Caution‘s co-writer wasn’t also the company’s CEO, but I’ll take whatever might lead to a stab at the MPAA and some respect for adult viewers in America. It’ll be an upward battle given that many media outlets refuse to take advertisements for NC-17 films, but director Ang Lee’s coming off Brokeback Mountain and Focus seems dedicated to promoting it one way or another. I didn’t need further incentive to check this one out, but this provides it nonetheless.
If you’d like more info on the MPAA’s strongly conservative views on what is acceptable sexual content, I’d recommend the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, for it includes actual clips from relevant films for side-by-side comparisons of what they’ve historically allowed in an R film and what they have not. In brief though, they generally consider males expressing sexual pleasure to be more acceptable than females expressing the same, and both are viewed more positively than any form of homosexuality. The doc also explores a variety of other censorship issues and the MPAA.
Lust, Caution is set for an initial limited release on September 28th.
