Entertainment

The MPAA ratings board doesn't judge when sex is crucial to the development of a character or a story, or if it's essential in a way that moves beyond the titillation of pornography. It considers such things as camera angles (the more conventional the better) and categorizes nudity (female: OK; male: only from the rear). Art and narrative are the furthest things from its mind, or its qualifications.

So it's no surprise that the anointed arbiters of decency slapped Ang Lee's Lust, Caution with an NC-17. Or that Mr. Lee, who won Oscars for both Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, decided to accept the rating rather than make cuts and appeal for an R.

Lust, Caution, based on Eileen Chang's 1983 short story, is the tale of two people who communicate and feel only through sex. Mr. Lee (Tony Leung) is a Chinese officer collaborating with the Japanese government during World War II. Wang Jiazhi (Wei Tang) is a radical drama student assigned to assassinate him. They make the mistake of falling in love, and their finely etched self-loathing manifests itself as rage-fueled lovemaking.

"It's very integral to the movie," said Mr. Lee at last month's Toronto International Film Festival. "But I wouldn't do it if sex was all there was. That would be like soft porn."

For Mr. Lee, who says he was "possessed" by Ms. Chang's story from the moment he read it, the relationship is fraught with meaning. For one, it depicts a Chinese woman reaching the limits of her sexuality against the backdrop of a fervently patriotic struggle. "The man-woman relationship is like occupying and being occupied, prey and predator, under the backdrop of China being occupied by Japan," he says. "The irony is that you don't know who the occupier is, the man or the woman."

It makes perfect sense. And I'd pay good money to hear him try to explain it to the obtuse MPAA. Mr. Lee says he never even considered resubmitting the film for a rating that would allow it to play in more theaters and make more money.

"Once we shot it, I didn't want to take out something so precious," he says. "It would be a shame. Even the actors would blame me. I would rather lose the showings than lose those precious shots."

The sex scenes were shot on a closed set, with a pared-down crew. Mr. Leung admits he was still uncomfortable, but, like his director, he says that without the scenes there would be no film.

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Tony Leung and Tang Wei

"Without the love scenes my character is incomplete," says Mr. Leung. "He is an animal. He looks very calm, but you can feel that he's very violent, like an animal trapped in its skin. You can feel that violence in the love scenes. They are so important to the characters."

Mr. Lee isn't the only filmmaker who grapples with such issues. Robert Benton's Feast of Love has its share of sex, none of it as explicit or athletic as that in Lust, Caution, but still crucial to the story.

Mr. Benton, who grew up in Oak Cliff and Waxahachie, decided it would be wise to play ball with his distributor, MGM, which wanted an R rating. That means, by definition, no male frontal nudity.

"When you show female nudity, the question you're most often asked is why you didn't show male nudity," Mr. Benton says. "It's the difference between an R and an NC-17. It's one of the big economic factors as far as the distributors are concerned. You can do the picture, but you can't cross that particular line. I think it's a foolish line, but nevertheless it's a line we all agreed to live with."

Of course, Lust, Caution will still show in theaters whose ownership permits NC-17 fare, such as the Angelika theaters in the Dallas area. And Mr. Lee had the option of gutting it to gain a wider audience.

Still, you have to wonder: At what point might the MPAA realize that a movie can have sex without being dirty?