Oscar-winning director Ang Lee's new film, "Lust, Caution," is such a challenging, defiant film that you leave it feeling slapped around, but at the same time exhilarated by Lee's boldness. Less than two years after being anointed with Hollywood's highest honor, he's gone off and made a film likely to confound American expectations.

"Lust, Caution" is NC-17 rated, almost entirely subtitled and, in terms of subject matter, unabashedly foreign. The only thing about it that speaks to Hollywood is its mood, a glorious homage to the classic films of the 1940s, particularly espionage thrillers like Hitchcock's "Notorious." Hitchcock played erotic chess matches with his characters. Lee does the same, but strips them naked for the game.

Our heroine, college student Wang Chia Chi (Tang Wei) is a fan of those films, and in her darkest hours is likely to go lose herself in the cinema (we see her weeping through the film that made Ingrid Bergman a star, "Intermezzo"). She's an actress herself, perhaps too talented for her own good, because as a young Chinese woman living under Japanese occupation during World War II, the only role available to her is that of professional seductress.

She stumbles into the role, really, having met up with a group of politically inclined drama students at her college in Hong Kong. They're led by Kuang (Wang Leehom), who is passionate about his cause and handsome enough to melt Chia Chi's heart, although her attraction is unspoken. They're all

fairly innocent, but they want to fight back against the Japanese, so they devise a drama of their own, to be played entirely off the stage, with Chia Chi assuming an undercover identity.

Their target is a married man named Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a Chinese collaborator with the Japanese, whose main function for the collaborationist regime seems to be suppressing the resistance movement. To that end, he's an expert torturer and interrogator. He's also an admirer of women, and in direct contrast to the students, whose bumbling is comical, he is self-assured and commanding. For Chia Chi, there's something undeniably alluring about being a pawn in his hands, even as she is charged with leading him toward checkmate.

That's a distilling of the first half of the movie, which was adapted from Eileen Chang's much-admired short story, "Lust, Caution." The film is deliberately chilly, and it's unlikely to make you weep the way Chia Chi cries over "Intermezzo." To mimic the war experience, it's also intentionally disorienting, beginning in Shanghai in 1942, then flashing back at length to 1938. Keeping up will require some patience, especially for audiences better versed in the American and European perspectives on World War II.

Eventually, all politics but the sexual ones are clear. Ang Lee shows us every detail of Chia Chi and Yee's affair, from their first, brutal, sadomasochist encounter to their explicit, NC-17-deserving lovemaking as the affair goes on. (It turns out there can be such a thing as too much sex in a film.) These scenes are like jigsaw puzzles, and honestly, not just baffling in their gymnastics but in the effect they have on Chia Chi.

The attraction makes her angry, but she loves the passion and responds. She's a young woman, and this is the only outlet for passion that she's offered by her country, her culture, and even by her closest allies. She's such a good actress she convinces herself of her role, but because she also knows herself to be a good actress -- from the first time we see her on stage she becomes confident of her talent and stays that way -- she has to continue to question any seeming conviction.

In popular culture, we'd call this by a term that begins with "mind" and ends with a dirty word. More politely, this is a woman used by war, turned into a prostitute, really, and unable to separate truth from fiction, not just in her mind, but in her heart.

Tony Leung ("In the Mood for Love," "Infernal Affairs" is almost disturbingly convincing as Yee, but this is Tang Wei's movie. It's her first film role, but she slips into the dual parts with the same kind of slippery grace we saw in Naomi Watts in "Mulholland Drive." It's a jaw-droppingly good debut.

Reach Mary F. Pols at 925-945-4741 or mpols@bayareanewsgroup.com.

"LUST, CAUTION"

B+

Starring: Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom

Director: Ang Lee

Rated: NC-17 for some explicit sexuality; In Mandarin with English subtitles

Opens today: Embarcadero, S.F.; more theaters on Oct. 12

Running time: 2 hours, 38 minutes