"Ganymede," if mispronounced, is a Chinese epithet. Sort of. I just watched "Lust, Caution" and loved it. It's better than No Country and There Will Be Blood; watch it. No, no, take it back...if you're Chinese, watch it. Otherwise, the movie will confound you like it did so many American reviewers. After I watched the movie, I read some reviews of it and came away with the impression that critics are carbuncled barrow boys too arrogant to admit that the people making the movie are more intelligent than the people reviewing it. For example, in his review, Ed Gonzalez, who usually has some decent things to say, doesn't recognize that the point of the newsreel interruption in the scene that he mentions is not the cheap irony of the Western media influence but the bitterness of triumphalist message about the end of Western imperialism being forced upon a Chinese audience by Japanese colonizers. Ed Gonzalez doesn't understand this because he doesn't understand Chinese history and he has unfortunately learned nothing of it from the movie because he has been too busy chasing the red herrings of his interpretive imagination to pay attention to the lesson. He probably doesn't understand that there are at least five languages at play in the movie (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Japanese, and English), because the subtitles don't indicate when the languages transition, and these shifts add meaning to the movie. This is not to disparage Ed Gonzalez, but just to point out that there is no audience for "Lust, Caution" in America. And by filling the movie with sex, Ang Lee has also sabotaged its reception in China.
Which is to say, it is the ultimate Taiwanese-Chinese-American lamentation of unbelonging! Thank you, Ang!! Go Blue!
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2 comments:
There's also the rest of the diaspora to appreciate it! I'm going to put it on the queue! I love Taiwan so much. My primary knowledge of its inhabitants who aren't directly related to me, though, comes from taking bus tours with my grandparents' church - most of the other sightseers are eldery Taipei waishengren like my mom's parents who came to Taiwan during the war and have also seen their children resettle in the West. Sometimes the streets seemed to me to be filled only with old people.
You should have done Loveboat. Then you would have seen the Taiwanese folks in the 22-25 year old age bracket just before they all flood to America. There are only old people and very young people in Taiwan.
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