Lust, Caution

In Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong, a young resistance operative seduces a powerful intelligence chief working for the collaborationist government, as part of a plot to assassinate him. Their increasingly dangerous relationship blurs the line between performance and genuine feeling.

The film is set against the Japanese occupation of China and the Wang Jingwei collaborationist regime in Shanghai, whose secret police pursued Chinese resistance networks with brutal efficiency.

Based on a novella by Eileen Chang; the characters are fictional composites rather than depictions of specific historical figures.

After the fall of Shanghai, Japanese forces advanced up the Yangtze and captured the Chinese capital, following it with weeks of mass killing and rape of civilians and disarmed soldiers.

Chinese defences collapsed on 12–13 December 1937. A small group of Western residents established the Nanjing Safety Zone, which sheltered a substantial part of the remaining civilian population. Estimates of the dead vary widely between Chinese, Japanese and Western scholarship.

Directed by Ang Lee

Cast: Tang Wei, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom

Positioned at 1938–1942 within the Second Sino-Japanese War phase of the war, as part of the Japanese occupation of China. This is entry 9 of 150 in the chronological archive.

• Japanese-occupied Shanghai
• resistance
• espionage
• collaborationist regime

• 

  Devils on the Doorstep

  1944–1945

• 

  The Children of Huang Shi

  1937–1945

• 

  The Eight Hundred

  26 October – 1 November 1937

• 

  John Rabe

  November 1937 – February 1938

• 

  The Flowers of War

  December 1937

• 

  City of Life and Death

  December 1937 – January 1938