SPOILER ALERT:  The endings to 3 films are revealed in this blog.

            I just finished watching Lust, Caution and I have to say—I am utterly sick of stories of underground resistance crumbling as a result of a woman’s actions.  It’s really a tired formula:  A female protagonist is involved in a subversive political movement, is depended on for a key element of some act being carried out, and at the last minute reveals the plan because her emotions get the better of her.  I am tired of women being portrayed as the ultimate betrayers.  And I am also angry that these consistent portrayals seem to reinforce the idea that women cannot help but develop emotional attachments and are therefore unreliable and unfit for work that demands clear-headedness.

            In Lust, Caution Wong Chia Chi, the protagonist, works as an undercover agent with a resistance movement during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.  A particulary sadistic minister takes to her, and she is charged with being his mistress and placing him in positions opportune to assassination.  His vicious nature is present with her too, as he repeatedly rapes and humiliates her.  She despises him, yet develops an attachment to him as she stays with him for a year.  As the final plan to kill him is underway, she exposes the plot, allowing him to escape because…he bought her a really fucking big diamond?!  I mean, I know there was more to it than that, but it was a bizarre narrative choice to say the least.

            I can think of at least two other films off the top of my head that contain similar plot lines.  The first is The Rising:  Ballad of Mangal Pande, a Bollywood film based on the mutiny led by an Indian sepoy against the British in 1857.  Although Mangal Pandey existed, the story depicted in the film has very little historical accuracy.  In The Rising, a wet nurse named Kamla betrays the sepoys’ plot to mutiny because, as she tells her white mistress, the white infant she nurses is “like her own child.”

            Similarly, in Catch a Fire, the wife of a man with a history of extramarital affairs betrays his involvement in the struggle against white supremacist apartheid in South Africa after a police officer shows her photographs of her husband with another woman.  Catch a Fire at least has the distinction of being very accurate to historical events, including the betrayal and the last-minute foiling of the plot. 

            I am sensing a disturbing trend here—not only are women the betrayers, but they are betrayers because they cannot control their emotional attachments to other people, even people they actually hate.  Has anyone else noticed and is annoyed by this?  Or have more examples of this plot arc?  (Also, please do post suggestions for films with positive portrayals of female freedom fighters!)