Lust, caution

Golden Lion at the 64th Venice International Film Festival. Year 1942 in Shanghai, in the middle of the World War II, the Chinese city is occupied by the Japanese army. There, Mrs. Mak, an elegant, sophisticated and well-off woman, remembers how she changed her whole life in 1938. Four years earlier, Mrs. Mak used her real name, Wong Chia Chi. Soon after the war broke out, her father left for England, leaving his daughter abandoned in China. In college, the young Wong Chia Chi meets Kuang Yu Min, who has just created a theater company to encourage patriotism in the university circle and extend it to the rest of China. Due to her incredible talent for interpretation, Wong Chia Chi becomes the most important actress of the theater company. Kuang Yu Min, on the other hand, begins to organize together with a student group a plan to assassinate Mr. Yee, a businessman who collaborates with the Japanese army. Wong Chia Chi, then, decides to pass herself off as Mrs. Mak, a woman of aristocratic airs, to become the new best friend of the wife of Mr. Yee, thus gaining her confidence and, thus, seduce Yee. Everything was going according to plan. However, an unforeseen event will radically change the course of events.