World War II · Film · 2007
Lust, Caution
色，戒
A student actress is drawn into a patriotic plot to seduce and kill a collaborator's spy chief, first in Hong Kong and then in occupied Shanghai, and loses herself in the role.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 2 places.
Stop 1: Hong Kong
Refugee students from a mainland university stage patriotic plays and then decide to act, casting Wong as a society wife to get close to Mr. Yee.
Stop 2: Occupied Shanghai
Key location
Recruited again by the Nationalist underground, Wong becomes Yee's mistress while the cell prepares an ambush at a jewellery shop.
What really happened
After Japan occupied eastern China, the former Nationalist leader Wang Jingwei set up a collaborationist government in Nanjing in 1940. Its secret police, headquartered at 76 Jessfield Road in Shanghai, hunted Nationalist and Communist agents, and both sides waged a vicious war of assassinations in the city, which Japan occupied completely after December 1941.
The film adapts a short story by Eileen Chang, loosely inspired by Zheng Pingru, a young Nationalist agent who in December 1939 tried to lure the secret-police chief Ding Mocun into an ambush at a Shanghai fur shop and was executed in 1940. It won the Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice Film Festival.
Where to watch
Checking streaming services…
Full details
- Original title
- 色，戒
- Directed by
- Ang Lee
- Countries
- United States, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong SAR China
- Languages
- Chinese, English, Japanese
- Released
- 2007
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- China & Southeast Asia
- Themes
- Espionage
- Resistance
- Romance
