'Lust, Caution' cast named

man, ang lee casting pop star wang leehom is just like zhang yimou casting jay chou for CITY. young actors their age actually trained in acting (of which are PLENTY in china) don't get a chance with the masters. it's all about getting teenage butts in seas:PP

except Leehom has actually done a lot of acting on-stage... Jay's just doing it for the money while Leehom's always had an interest in it.

Casting Tony Leung is always a good decision. I'm really interested in the pairing of him with Ang Lee...should be great.

You cannot compare Leehom's acting with Jay's. Not saying that Leehom is a brilliant actor, but he's 10000 MILES ahead from Jay.

Besides, Leehom has some acting experience... being in several movies also in several musical plays. He shouldn't be too bad.

waaaa!!!great cast...great director....great story....surely a great movie...
being a malaysian, proud to hear some shots will be filmed here in malaysia....

From the above picture, it looks like they got Tang Wei's hairstyle right. Hollywood has big fear with authentic period details for stories set in the 1940s. The main reason. of course, is that the 40's fashion style is not considered very becoming to today's standard. I am glad Ang Lee has the wisdom adn courage to stick to authenticity. Maybe because he is Chinese and the film is to be filmed in China. I sincerely hope this masterpiece by Aileen Chang will be successfully adapted onto the big screen. It's chilling, sexy, sad and sophisticated, It will be a great challenge for Lee.

Its a mojor set up in Ipoh and Penang. Mild set up in kampar.
Its a mad rush at the moment........ set up is at 60% now.......

Ang Lee's current film project, titled "Love, Caution" and
currently being shot in several locations across Asia, is based on a
26-page short
story by Chinese novelist Eileen Chang (1920-1995). Lee purchased film rights to the Chang story, which is relatively unknown in the West,
and the movie is scheduled to be released sometime in 2007, according
to Hollywood sources.

This month, not in connection with the movie but with impeccable timing
nonetheless, New York Review Books has teamed up with Karen Kingsbury, a former professor in Taiwan and a well-known American translator of some
of Chang's other literary works, to publish a new
translated collection of Chang's works, titled "Love In a Fallen
City".

Kingsbury, currently residing in Seattle, taught Chinese and Taiwanese literature at
Tunghai University in Taichung for 14 years before moving back to the U.S. this year. When asked if the short story that Lee is filming now with a large cast of Asian actors has been included in the new collection, Kingsbury said in an email:
"Unfortunately, a translation of 'Lust,
Caution' was not included. That particular short story comes a bit
later in the oeuvre than Chang's first big fiction
collection 'Chuanqi' on which this collection was based."

When asked how the current translation came about, Kingsbury said that the publisher in New York contacted her directly and asked her to do the translations. "

"I've never had a literary agent, although several have approached me, and over the years I've been approached by several different publishing houses," Kingsbury said. "presses. "The first few encounters taught me to be cautious, because not everyone in the publishing world seemed ready to cope with the kind of sustained, long-term effort I felt was needed for this kind of translation work. And I learned, through trial and error, that I wanted a good, strong literary house, rather than an academic one. That's where Chang belongs -- in the company of world-class writers, over and above her classification as a Chinese writer. So when I saw that New York Review Books could list her alongside Chekhov, Hawthorne, Balzac, Auden and Colette, among others, then I felt I'd found the right home for this book."

"At the same time, because I am in many ways a beginning translator, I needed a very patient editor, someone with pitch-perfect English and a good understanding of translation issues," Kingsbury added. "I was fortunate to have several bilingual readers, in Taiwan, who reviewed my drafts for basic correctness -- Chang is a famously rich and complex stylist, something like William Faulkner in English. But I also needed someone, as an editor, who could read the drafts from an "English-only" perspective, and Edwin Frank at NYRB was everything I could have wished in this regard. He was my 'zhiyin' reader, the one who could "hear my tune" in English, even when I was fumbling over notes"

Kingsbury noted that the copies of the new book arrived at her home in Seattle recently "at a very odd moment in my life." She explained: "I finished the Chang book while my family was relocating from Taiwan to Seattle -- my husband did all the packing, and I just wrote. Then, after we had picked up our handy old car from my mother's home in California and found a new place to live in Seattle, the car was stolen. In America, as you know, that's almost like losing your legs."

"But the very next day, "Kingsbury continued, "an unassuming little package arrived in the mail from New York, my first copy of the book, that contained the fruits of some fifteen years of labor -- what with the move from Taiwan and the car theft, I'd almost forgotten about the book. The day after that, however, the Seattle police found our car, only slightly damaged. I sometimes wonder if someone stage-managed the whole thing for dramatic effect -- I feel certain that Chang would have found it very funny."

Chang (愛玲), whose literary works remain relatively unknown in the West --
something Kingsbury's NYRB translation and Lee's movie are set to
rectify -- led an
interesting life. Born in Shanghai in 1920, she died 75 years
later in Los Angeles, having spent a lifetime writing essays, short stories
and novellas in Chinese. She grew up in a
rather dysfunctional family, which some observers have said probably
fueled the author's tragic outlook on life and which was reflected in
a strong literary output over a 50-year period.

There is already a film version of "Love in a Fallen City", according
to Kingsbury, and that movie was released in 1984 and directed
by Xu Anhua.

Kingsbury, who did her Columbia University doctoral dissertation on
Chang, has published previous translations of Chang's essays and
fiction in "Renditions" and in "The Columbia Anthology of Modern
Chinese Literature".

According to a critic writing in the Boston Review, "Chang's obsession
with privacy made her known as the 'Garbo of Chinese letters,' and
photographs reveal a woman whose elegance and contemplative
introspection justify that title. Nevertheless, from out of the frenzy
of renown that surrounded her, the sheer quality of Chang's prose
emerges clearly,and her voice...has a sound like none other in the
canon of Chinese, or for that matter, American prose stylists."

Ang Lee is also quoted on the publisher's website as saying: "With
language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide
in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled
modernity. She was one of the very few who could see on both sides of
that divide, into which her heroines so often disappeared. Eileen
Chang is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these
excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so
revered by Chinese readers everywhere."

With pre-publication blurbs like this, Kingsbury's translation is sure
to catch the eyes of readers in English-speaking countries worldwide.
So who was Eileen Chang? Her life followed an interesting arc that in
itself would make a very dramatic movie.

The daugther of a wealthy family in Shanghai, Chang entered the University of
Hong Kong in 1939 where she majored in literature. However, when Hong
Kong was occupied by Japan during World War II, Chang moved back to
her hometown and made a meager living
writing and translating. This
was also the time when she met a man who would later become her first
husband, Hu
Lancheng (胡兰成), but their marriage, while initially happy, was also
full of complications and infidelities, ending in a divorce court in
Shanghai in 1947.

In 1952, Chang found work as a translator for a foreign news agency in
Hong Kong, and then in 1955, she booked passage on a ship to North
America. She would never set foot in China again, although she
did visit Taiwan in 1961 when she was in her early 40s.

Chang's met her second husband, an American scriptwriter named
Ferdinand Reyer, in the U.S. and married him a year after arriving
there. After Reyer died from a stroke, Chang found
work at Harvard University in Boston and later at
the
University of California at its Berkeley campus. In 1973, Chang moved to Los
Angeles, where she spent her final 22 years of life, becoming --
according to those who knew her --
increasing reclusive in her old age.

When asked how she first encountered the writings of Chang, Kingsbury said: "Like most English-speaking students of Chinese literature, I first encountered Chang in her own English version of 'The Golden Cangue', and in the long passage from 'Jasmine Tea' which C.T. Hsia included in his seminal history of modern Chinese literature. Those stories made a strong impression but, to tell the truth, I didn't really understand why Hsia had praised her so highly until I read 'Love in a Fallen City' in Chinese. I was an English Department student who had sort of wandered into Chinese, and I was looking for a 20th-century Chinese writer who could speak to my English Department classmates and teachers, but not as an 'exotic' or some sort of charity case. Chang did."

"I was looking for a modern Chinese writer from whom the English Department could learn something about topics that they cared about already," Kingsbury added. "Not just something about Chinese-ness, or about one huge people's modern-day history of struggle and change, but about mental and social life in general. Reading and re-reading Eileen Chang has changed and enriched me almost immeasurably; my humble hope is that these translations will help to make that sort of learning possible for others as well."

While some literary historians suspect that Chang died under "mysterious circumstances" in Los Angeles, Kingsbury doesn't believe that. "Her death, from what I can tell, was not particularly mysterious. She died of natural causes, and her health problems were worsened by self-neglect, or perhaps we should say a certain studied disregard when it came to her own physical well-being. The mystery, such as it is, revolves around her intense desire for privacy and her disinterest in what we might call normal social life, precisely in those years when her fame in the Chinese-speaking world was growing exponentially (the 1970s -1990s)."

"It's important to remember that Chang, like many very gifted people, had always tended toward introversion, and that her early forays into public life, back in Shanghai in the 1940s, had ended in disaster: she was blackballed by the Communists because she'd let herself become too prominent during the Japanese occupation," Kingsbury said. "It's not surprising that a basically shy person who had been severely punished for early audacity would choose, in her later years, to withdraw into hermetic seclusion. Sensitive artists, in many cases, only grow more sensitive over time. Chang has often been compared to Greta Garbo; to me, she's more like American artist Georgia O'Keefe, another great artist who rushed out to meet life in her early years, but later on went to great lengths to construct a much less exposed way of living."

As for the timing of the publication of the book, with Lee's movie filming now in Asia, Kingsbury said: "The only tie-in is world-historical. Eileen Chang's time has come, and she'll no longer be an obscure writer, even in English."

Kingsbury added that she is not sure how or even whether the collection that she has assembled and Lee movie titled "Lust, Caution" will fit together. "The story that Lee is shooting was written relatively late in Chang's career, even though it's set in the same period as the stories in my collection -- stories that she wrote when she was still in her twenties," Kingsbury said.

"'Lust, Caution' is a rather unusual story, within Chang's oeuvre, because it's indebted to Cold War spy fiction and the Hollywood tradition of the action-suspense thriller," Kingsbury said. "Her more characteristic stories focus on character and setting, but this is a story that centers on plot -- which of course makes it an excellent choice for filming. To put it another way, this is a hardboiled sort of story and should fit beautifully into the genre of film noire. Of course, Ang Lee is bound to throw in lots of his own surprises. But viewers of the film who then pick up 'Love in a Fallen City' will probably have to switch gears a bit -- down-shift, I guess -- and work through some fairly complex cultural moments. Chang's early-period storytelling takes place at the intersections of late-Qing and early modern cultures. Her story 'Lust, Caution' crossed those earlier divides. It's more entirely, less ambiguously modern."