Winter of Love, part one

30 summers after the American Summer of Love, the time may have come for the Chinese Winter of Love.

In China - and Hong Kong is no exception to that- sex is quite a big taboo. As an example, a scene of a TV ad for my favorite toothpaste brand, where you could see a young married couple lips kissing under the water, had to be cut for moral issues after China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) reviewed it.

The fact they showed their affection for each other in a swimming pool, how silly it was, was acceptable but lip kissing definitely wasn’t.

Sex is a sensitive subject, a subject that I have very rarely heard as part of a discussion with local friends or colleagues. But things may be changing, thanks to a respected Taiwanese film director who bowed Chinese censorship to better bypass it and a Hong Kong male star who had to get his computer repaired.

The film director is Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain…).

To me this guy is THE master of perversion. With movies that look rather innocuous he manages to create big disturbance through his ability to manipulate powerful icons and cultural symbols.

In Brokeback Mountain, you could not help seeing the Marlboro cow boy, you could not help seeing western mass market symbols of virility and freedom. Yet they were gay.



Now with his latest movie ‘Lust and Caution’ is making it again but this time in China.

The movie takes place in Shanghai in the forties during the Japanese occupation and shows the heroic behavior of young enthusiastic Chinese patriots trying to kill a senior Chinese collaborator.

All great stuffs for Chinese censorship to allow enthusiastically the movie to be release, as long as Ang Lee would accept to cut all the sex scenes…

As a matter of fact the young patriot is an attractive Chinese woman with a mission to seduce to approach and then kill the nasty collaborator. The whole story revolves around their relationship that rapidly gets very physical.



Ang Lee accepted the censorship to the condition that he would be the one doing the Chinese cut. The film got about 15 minutes shorter (and quite likely emptied of much of its substance as the intensity and ambiguous character of their sex relationship IS the main subject of the film).

Meanwhile the full version got released in Hong Kong in mandarin and cantonese.

I went to the screening on the first week and it felt like watching some secret files from the CIA: we and our bags got checked before we entered the cinema and during the whole movie someone from the movie theater staff kept patrolling in the alleys to make sure nobody was filming...

In the following weeks, the box office surprisingly kept growing as more and more people from southern Mainland China, who knew about what happened to the film in China, went to see the full version in Hong Kong.

And of course pirate DVDs of the full version started to appear in China turning the official censored version into some kind on trailer for the full version.

Ang Lee is a smart man.