Like In the Mood, Lust asks when the role playing stops and the real self begins, if ever. It broadens the stage to include the world, and that makes it a more ambitious film, if a less accomplished one. What insight into the soul it achieves lies not in its naked gymnastics but in scenes like the one showing how difficult and prolonged a labor it is to kill another human being, or the one in which a young woman rides a tram through the empty night of Hong Kong, ecstatic with her first triumphant performance.
