It's unnerving to see "Lust, Caution" as the title of Ang Lee's provocative new film because these states, each capable of obliterating the other, exist at the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum.

They can never be reconciled, and characters who are forced by circumstance to live on the knife's edge between them not only endure unbearable tension but risk savage emotional destruction as well.

Just such a situation is the heart of Lee's intense, psychologically intricate and sexually explicit film worked from a short story by the influential Chinese writer Eileen Chang about a disturbing love affair set in China during the years of its World War II occupation by Japan.
A brooding meditation on the unnerving power and terrible cost of emotional and political masquerades, the Chinese-language "Lust, Caution" gets under your skin with its examination of what qualifies as love and what does not.

While the nearly 2 hour and 40 minute "Lust" is as deliberately paced and as determined to take its time as the most rarefied art film, its story is an unapologetic wartime melodrama, centering as it does on spies, assassination plots, adultery and several kinds of betrayal.

The sex scenes in "Lust, Caution" are explicit and essential to understanding character and motivation.

Though the sex is graphic, it is by no means loving; in fact the hostility of the first encounter recalls the sexual initiation in Lee's "Brokeback Mountain." While they might not admit it, this appears to be the only place where the main characters are honest with each other, where the tortured, ever-changing relationship between them plays itself out.

Surrounding himself with an excellent team, including his long time editor Tim Squyres, Lee has made a film of ambition and accomplishment, one that is both a summation of all he knows and a promise of even greater achievement in the future.