Performing Bodies, Translated Histories: Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Transnational Cinema, and Chinese Diasporas

The essay attempts a semiotic, of a controversial film: Lust, Caution by the Taiwanese director Ang Lee, taken from a novella by Eillen Chang, that may be considered an example of the ambiguities of contemporary cultural products of the Chinese diaspora since the rise of China. It analyzes the film as an example of contemporary debates over cinema as a medium through which a particular memory of China may be repackaged for the consumption of a global audience. How has Ang Lee’s own aesthetic practice readapted that of Eillen Chang, who was herself infl uenced by European culture when living in China and whose work was influenced by the intellectual and political climate of the United States during the Cold War era? By looking at the way Lee reinterprets the novella, this article aims at showing how Lust, Caution is a film that juxtaposes and intertwines a variety of texts at various levels of personal and collective memory.