A Cautionary Tale.(Movies)(Lust, Caution)(Movie review)

Byline: David Ansen

Ang Lee's opulent new period melodrama is filled with explosive elements that never fully ignite.

Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" begins in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942, on the day a long-simmering plot to assassinate a powerful Chinese collaborator is to come to fruition. Wong Chai Chi (Tang Wei), a beautiful former student actress who has joined the Resistance, has given away her innocence, her romantic dreams and years of her life to entrap the traitor, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), the ruthless head of the Secret Service in Shanghai. Posing as a rich merchant's wife, she has become his mistress. It's a role she's played so deeply and so well she's begun to question her own identity, her loyalties and what her true feelings are for the man she's about to lure to his death.

"Lust, Caution" then loops back in time to 1939 Hong Kong, unfolding on a large, opulently appointed canvas that re-creates the student fervor of Hong Kong and the decadence and paranoia of pre-revolutionary Shanghai. An erotic, violent melodrama, filled with echoes of such Hitchcock movies as "Notorious" and "Suspicion," Lee's movie is composed of one highly flammable ingredient after another. Why, then, doesn't it ever fully ignite? For all its hothouse passions and sometimes brutally explicit sex scenes, the storytelling seems curiously stolid, the style too movie-ish for its own good.

Lee, who won the 2006 best-director Oscar for his cowboy love story "Brokeback ...