When Sex Doesn’t Sell

The film is gliding along, well into its second hour of stately intrigue, as a young woman in Japanese-occupied China woos a Chinese collaborator, hoping to get close enough to kill him. Then the man (Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-wai) takes the woman (newcomer Tang Wei) to bed, and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution becomes a different movie. In three startling sex scenes, the two actors mime first a brutal seduction, then a sadomasochistic pas de deux, then the flexing of the woman’s wiles until she has achieved erotic control of her prey.

Two years ago, Lee won a Best Director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, a less explicit but no less passionate story of two gay cowboys. He took that cachet and banked it on a Mandarin-language drama that has earned the Motion Picture Association’s NC-17 rating (no children under 17). That rating will keep Lust, Caution out of many cinemas because lots of theater owners won’t show films with a rating harder than R. Nor, if current standards hold, will the dvd be available at Wal-Mart or Blockbuster. But the $83 million theatrical take of Brokeback makes some in the film community hope that Lee’s new movie will cue a box-office breakthrough for adults-only dramas.

Since 1968, when the ratings system was introduced, its classifications–G for general audiences, PG for parental guidance, PG-13 for sterner stuff kids could still see and R, restricting children’s attendance except with an adult–have adapted to accommodate the evolving tastes of moviegoers. The G now goes to few films because parents figure a PG (say, Shrek the Third) is safe. The R promises hot stuff for fanboys, which has translated into hits in several genres: violent action (300), raunchy humor (Superbad) and lurid horror (the Saw franchise). PG-13 has become the money rating. It’s the one given to mainstream action movies and comedies, and it accounts for seven of this year’s 10 top hits. As the ratings code has gotten more liberal, so has the audience’s fondness for movies with stricter ratings.

What hasn’t changed is the NC-17. Though the designation got a makeover in 1990–it used to be X–it still has the old, unfair tinge of porn. The big studios avoid it. Mostly it goes to sexually charged fare from world-class directors, like Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education ($5.2 million domestic) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers ($2.5 million). The one big, glitzy NC-17 movie, the 1995 Vegas-stripper epic Showgirls, cost $45 million to produce and earned just $20 million. That modest sum is the highest take ever for an NC-17.

Will the lure of forbidden fruit get the mass audience into a Chinese political drama? Lee isn’t sure that people’s desire to see the scenes that garnered the NC-17 rating will help. “That’s a plus,” he told TIME, “but the plus is 10 points, and the minus is 80 points.”

The plus should be that audiences get to see mature films dealing with the joy and pain, the drama and power plays in the act of love. But those films aren’t seen–worse, they aren’t made–because for all the naughty words and bloody corpses in today’s movies, Hollywood is a timid place, at once prurient and puritanical. It’s afraid of films that show strong, subtle passions between men and women. If Lust, Caution becomes a hit–a long shot, given its 2 1/2 hr. running time and lack of marquee names–it would be bucking both the NC-17 stigma and the current aversion to serious, old-fashioned screen romance.

When it comes to sex, Hollywood movies are no lust, all caution.