FILM | Good Mr Yee, bad Mr Yee

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart” – W.H. Auden

It was chilly in the hotel in Kyoto and my mind fevered, the night I met Eileen Chang’s Mr Yee.

(LUST, CAUTION SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Legend has it that Mr Yee is based on Ms Chang’s first husband, Hu Lan-cheng, a onetime official in the puppet government during the Sino-Japanese war, a writer as cold-eyed as she was. (He once wrote, “I cannot accept all sorts of things about Eileen. She never bemoans the state of the universe and pities the people nor sympathises with anybody nor donates anything at all. In her world no one is aggrandised and no one is aggrieved. She is extremely selfish, extremely cruel. She is extremely severe with good people and good things and with ordinary people and ordinary things she is also this strict. She really is egalitarian.”)

In Lust, Caution the short story the heroine has seduced (and been seduced by) Mr Yee, a collaborator, to spy on him for a few amateur actors turned amateur Resistance assassins. The tale is told through the stream of her consciousness and he breaks in only twice. The first time we hear his thoughts he is at a jeweller’s with her and feeling slightly sorry for himself: He thought she was drawn to him, not only to his power but also to him. He knew women would want presents, oh, he knew, but he thought… He thought he could indulge a little longer in his middle-aged man’s fantasy of love. (She doesn’t hear his thoughts but when she sees his sorrowful smile…she wavers. She dies for it.) The second time we hear his thoughts he is at home and fearing for his safety after the botched assassination, blaming his missus for bringing home the spy…and feeling somewhat smug: So she did love him. She had to have hated him before her execution. But he who has no venom is no man. Were he not such a man she couldn’t have loved him. Anyway, alive, she was his woman and dead, she is and will be his ghost.

This Mr Yee is ruthless and remorseless. Drop-dead hot somehow. He occupied my mind for two entire days as Ms Chang’s words played in my head over and over. She had slept with the enemy, hadn’t she, and known the warm hands that came with the cold unrepentant heart.

I wonder what she would have thought of Lee Ang’s Mr Yee (Tony Leung), who slinks home in Lust, Caution the film after his lover’s execution, steals into her bedroom and sits on her bed pensively. This Mr Yee is the picture of ageing romantic regret, the latest in a long line of men of non-action from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s reserved swordsman Li Mubai to Brokeback Mountain’s lonesome cowboy Ennis Del Mar. He isn’t the man I pictured. Being also middle-aged and male, might Mr Lee have been too sensitively sympathetic?