Beyond language: the postmodern poetics of Ang Lee's adaptation of Lust/Caution

Abstract

Based on Robert Stam's notion of filmic adaptation as a cultural critique and through a detailed analysis of the postmodernist styles of intertextuality, dissolving the history, parodic representation, and the body narrative in the filmic text, this article argues that Ang Lee's film Lust/Caution (2007) adapted from Eileen Chang's fiction Lust, caution is a re-creation embedded with subtle and significant cultural politics. It can be seen as an intellectual endeavour to problematise the ideological assumptions of Self and the Other, history, identity and nationalism, to deconstruct the multiple forms of power that have enslaved human beings, women in particular, and to demonstrate his hope for equality, tolerance and coexistence in human society. In a word, Ang Lee's cinematic adaptation, going far beyond Eileen Chang's representation of private experiences, is an intellectual process of cultural poetics that subverts the mythic language of nationalism and national identity.