Venice ends on sour note

By Mike Collett-White and Silvia Aloisi

VENICE (Reuters) - Ang Lee has walked off with another top award at the Venice film festival, and surprised critics are wondering how he did it.

"Lust, Caution" ("Se, Jie") won the Golden Lion late on Saturday, two years after the Taiwanese director scooped the big prize for gay cowboy drama "Brokeback Mountain."

In 2005 he was a popular winner. In 2007 he was not.

Reporters and critics in the press room, watching the closing ceremony beamed live on a big screen, booed when Lee's Golden Lion was announced, and again, more loudly, when Hollywood star Brad Pitt was named best actor.

"In all of the pre-award speculation, nobody had thought about Ang Lee's film, not even for one of the lesser awards," Natalia Aspesi wrote in La Repubblica newspaper on Sunday.

At a post-verdict news conference, jury president Zhang Yimou offered no explanation of the panel's decision to give the Golden Lion to Lee's film.

Reviews of "Lust, Caution" were generally negative, arguing that at 156 minutes it was much too long. The slow narrative, set in World War Two Shanghai, is punctuated by explicit and sometimes violent sex which Lee hinted was real.

The Hollywood Reporter's verdict was: "Ang Lee's lugubrious spy epic ... brings to mind what soldiers say about war: that it's long periods of boredom relieved by moments of extremely heightened excitement."