YMMV / Lust, Caution

• Awesome Music: "Wong Chia Chi's Theme" by Alexandre Desplat is just beautiful.
• Franchise Original Sin: Of a sort: this movie was one of the early examples in the 21st century of a dark, brutal story of the Japanese occupation of China. After this film was released, the floodgates opened and dozens and dozens of TV shows and movies about this period started popping up on Chinese airwaves every year. As time went by, these works kept pushing the envelope in terms of their content and started becoming more exploitative and fetishistic to the point that official government newspapers slammed these shows and started banning them^note For example, one episode of the 2015 Chinese TV show 一起打鬼子 (Yī Qǐ Dá Guǐ Zi, creatively translated in English as Let Us Fight the Japanese Devils Together) ends with the female lead visiting the imprisoned male lead under the guise of a conjugal visit, sneaking in a hand grenade in her vagina, mutually masturbating each other while the Japanese jailer watches, and then pulling out the grenade and blowing themselves up as an act of resistance. Lust, Caution quite frankly was the first high-profile example of one of these stories about the occupation with explicit sexual content, and it was a work that got its lead actress Tang Wei banned from being cast in movies for 3 years.

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