Ang Lee vs. Cheri Caffaro

As I watched Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, my mind turned to the 1972 exploitation film The Abductors, starring Cheri Caffaro as private investigator Ginger McAllister. Like the other films in the Ginger series, The Abductors uses the detective genre as an excuse for writer-director Don Schain (Caffaro's husband at the time) to combine sex and bondage in equal parts.

The Abductors, not a good film, features a ring of sex slavers who kidnap cheerleaders. Ginger and her cohorts enlist one of Ginger's young female friends to go undercover and get kidnapped by the slavery ring. After she is raped by the gang leader, however, the undercover agent gives information against the good guys. No torture is required for this purpose, just slow, persuasive sex.

Somehow Ginger's crew, which includes both men and women, wins anyway. At the end, the undercover agent apologizes for having betrayed her own team. Don't worry about it, say the magnanimous victors. And there are no hard feelings.

I was struck by two aspects of this dramaturgy. First, and most obviously, the sexual politics that underlie this plot are unusually retrograde, and would have seemed so even before the women's movement gathered steam. Schain assumes, probably without intending controversy, that a woman will naturally be unable to withhold information from a man who makes love to her effectively. No one in the film questions this.

Second, having established these caveman ground rules, the film uses them generously. It would have been easy, even normal, for the film to cast away the sex-addled undercover agent after her capitulation. But Schain never considers this option: the agent continues to fight on the side of justice, and does not lose her status as one of the good guys. Good nature is not the province of any one ideology.

Lust, Caution uses almost the same plot. Here too, the undercover heroine's betrayal (much more costly than in The Abductors) does not alienate the filmmakers' sympathies, and the woman's betrayed comrade smiles his understanding at her. However, Lust, Caution announces itself as a tragic love story, whereas The Abductors is pretending to be an ensemble adventure film. By the rules of his chosen form, Schain is working against genre expectations; Lee and his writers are merely in compliance with their genre.

Otherwise, I can't see that Lust, Caution mined much more complexity from this concept than The Abductors did.