It is a film of a young woman's prowess and tragedy narrated with a flashback between two current sequences. In a mixed genre of adultery and espionage, the story is told in a unrestricted narrative in which the audience are disseminated with full information some characters don't have. Despite the unrestrictedness in the knowledge domain of the audience, tension mounts on when Jiazhi Wang (Wei Tang) embarks on her mission to assassinate her target as the audience are puzzled with the leads' staging and other diegetic hints on whether or not her identity is or will be exposed.
Director Lee packs the film with sex, a common element of the genre. Lee establishes Wang as a cool girl in the expository sequences by use of apathetic expression (actually a non-expression) under freeze staging. Down the plot, Wang apparently remains tough and firm in her mission, as revealed from her dialogues. Nevertheless, Lee portrays Wang's evolutionary attitude toward Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) essentially by use of the 3 sex sequences in which Wang behaviorally shifts from being passive to active. As a mirrored portray, Mr. Yee's calmness (and seriousness as well) is seen alleviated by his disclosure of his job to Wang in the last hour of the story. Lee in practice builds up a subtle, slow-paced escalation of passion and psychological mutation of both leads, culminating to the diegetic climax.
The carefully choreographed overt sex sequences, in a whole, are instrumental in portraying the evolution of subdued passiveness of Wang toward her target. The sequences witness Wang's gradual sentimental change from taking up a hunting job in fulfillment of her patriotic duty to the nation to an ever deepening voluntary enchantment with her target. Lee goes further from his "Brokeback Mountain" to enhance the degree of explicitness by bringing the leads' body/pubic hairs, Wang's underarm hairs in a close-up in particular, into mise-en-scene to connote the rawness and liberation of the couple's desires.
With the acts of excruciation and execution of spies brought off screen, Lee keeps violence to the minimum despite the blood shedding sequence in the Hong Kong apartment in an earlier plot. There is a slight change of cinematographic style in the film: fast cutting and swish pans at the beginning; slow cutting, static camera and occasional tracking from the middle to the epilogue. While both leads exercise caution along their ways in concealing their respective motives, rationality is, consciously and unconsciously, marooned by lust, the desire for love and sentiments, which eventually render betrayal and fiasco. The film is a narrative on the subordination of rationality to long suppressed emotion and passion.
Director Lee packs the film with sex, a common element of the genre. Lee establishes Wang as a cool girl in the expository sequences by use of apathetic expression (actually a non-expression) under freeze staging. Down the plot, Wang apparently remains tough and firm in her mission, as revealed from her dialogues. Nevertheless, Lee portrays Wang's evolutionary attitude toward Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) essentially by use of the 3 sex sequences in which Wang behaviorally shifts from being passive to active. As a mirrored portray, Mr. Yee's calmness (and seriousness as well) is seen alleviated by his disclosure of his job to Wang in the last hour of the story. Lee in practice builds up a subtle, slow-paced escalation of passion and psychological mutation of both leads, culminating to the diegetic climax.
The carefully choreographed overt sex sequences, in a whole, are instrumental in portraying the evolution of subdued passiveness of Wang toward her target. The sequences witness Wang's gradual sentimental change from taking up a hunting job in fulfillment of her patriotic duty to the nation to an ever deepening voluntary enchantment with her target. Lee goes further from his "Brokeback Mountain" to enhance the degree of explicitness by bringing the leads' body/pubic hairs, Wang's underarm hairs in a close-up in particular, into mise-en-scene to connote the rawness and liberation of the couple's desires.
With the acts of excruciation and execution of spies brought off screen, Lee keeps violence to the minimum despite the blood shedding sequence in the Hong Kong apartment in an earlier plot. There is a slight change of cinematographic style in the film: fast cutting and swish pans at the beginning; slow cutting, static camera and occasional tracking from the middle to the epilogue. While both leads exercise caution along their ways in concealing their respective motives, rationality is, consciously and unconsciously, marooned by lust, the desire for love and sentiments, which eventually render betrayal and fiasco. The film is a narrative on the subordination of rationality to long suppressed emotion and passion.