“In the Cut”, which premiered in 2003, is Jane Campion’s most ghettoized picture. The Australian director has been lauded for films such as The Piano, about motherhood and marriage, and The Power of the Dog, her subversive western. But when she makes her interesting periodic vacations from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some critics seem undeterred. (Some are, like Manohla Dargis, who described “In the Cut” as a “stunningly beautiful new film” that could be “the year’s most maddeningly flawed great film,” but most reviewers expressed sheer bewilderment bordering on derision. ) The film is about Frannie Avery, an English professor (Meg Ryan) whose erotic revival is ignited by her attraction to a cop, Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), who investigates murders in lower Manhattan. These murders are femicides – the killer targets, kills and then dismembers women, leaving behind an engagement ring as his signature.
To be a woman in the In Cut universe is to be hunted. Marriage is not a refuge. Objections to the film range from aesthetic to moral. His soft-focus visual world—the sequences of sunbeams obliterating any view of the city center and its people, with those people enveloped in grease and heat—was too pretentious. There was also irritation about Ryan showing her breasts – a lover made impure through crime. The prevailing narrative was that Campion got the erotic thriller wrong, that her study of the persecuted woman smacked of shallow “post-feminist” whimsy.
In an age where we crave pathetic screen pleasure, “In the Cut” is ripe for reclamation. It will be shown at Metrograph in New York next month as part of a series that equates the film’s exploration of female subjectivity with that of Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle. The film that “killed” Meg Ryan’s career increasingly has its defenders who claim it is a masterpiece, a “vital subversion of the male gaze” that should have made her fame more complex. Last year, on an episode of The Letterboxd Show podcast marking the film’s twentieth anniversary, Campion expressed his appreciation for those advocates, though he complained about how long it took audiences to come around. “The turnaround took so long, about twenty years, that I gave up,” she said.
Where does the distribution of masterpieces lead us? “In the Cut” gets under our skin because of its imperfection, as Dargis wrote, its brutal willingness to go to the edge of what cinema can be. The film’s chemical structure mixes with our own: Frannie’s descent into paranoia and fear is our descent; her desire is also our desire. “In the Cut” wants to remain somewhat lost, having strayed from the film’s canonization as much as the main character is from his own wants and needs. One reading of the film’s title is that it is slang for vagina; that’s the meaning that Suzanne Moore, the author of the book on which the film is based, said she intended. But the other reading I’ve always understood is that of a place that’s hard to get to on purpose, that can’t afford to be too famous.
Cinematographer Dion Beebe turns New York into a swollen crocus. With its ocher palette, “In the Cut” feels like summer, but its variability matches the noise of spring. Meanwhile, Franny is a movie flower to worry about. The physical embodiment of Ryan’s character, all weightlessness, slumped shoulders and slack mouth, intersects the somnambulism of the nineties model with the mystery of the old maid of the fifties. She’s sober, in her pencil skirt, but she looks drugged and on what? Language, of course, and her own loneliness. She is working on a book about slang. Like a magpie, she hoards poetry she picks up on subway ads and overheard koans, decorating her East Village apartment with scribbled notes. Men are being held outside this apartment. One of her students, Cornelius (Sharif Pugh), who is Black, has a pomposity—he believes serial killer John Wayne Gacy is innocent—that she can’t resist, in a chic, jungle-fever kind of way. Her flirtation with Cornelius, whom she studies, picking up his slang, makes her seem interestingly low. There’s also her recent and abusive ex, played by Kevin Bacon, circling excitedly. He can’t understand why Franny isn’t answering his phone calls. He can’t understand why she lacks the programming that would make her fall and submit to him, an ability he intuited is present in Frannie’s younger sister, the optimistic and wistful Pauline, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Pauline loves so much that she risks the law. She is reeling from the end of an affair with a doctor who filed a restraining order against her. How can a woman, we think, especially this woman, are you threatening a man? The men come to the building where Pauline lives; her apartment is above a strip club, for wine down. The place is run by a quirky hit man, lovingly played by Patrice O’Neill, a security guard who won’t let the plain suits rolling in think they can walk away with more than they paid for.
The fungibility of the predatory role is a concern of this film, which becomes clearer when Detective Malloy, the third person in Frannie’s orbit, makes his way to her apartment and destroys everything. Malloy’s entry into Frannie’s life begins a story that she, approaching forty, thought was already impossible for her. Frannie is romantic about one thing: her parents’ love story. It’s a film about how women are made as much by stories as by their mothers. This is not a real life movie. Nor is it a popcorn thriller: the hallmarks of noir—the unknown killer, the hidden weapon, the foreboding trap—move only in the background. In one scene, Frannie asks Pauline: has she ever heard the story of how their mother and father met? A silent film starring actors appears on the screen as Frannie tells the story of two lovers who are helplessly drawn to each other on an ice rink.
I love Dargis’s reading, in her original review, of the symbolism of “In Cut” as fairy tale or mythic. The shocking thing about this film is how successfully it alienates its viewer from the true history of this town of dead women. He uses the predator genre, redirecting his explorations of repression and sex. Competence is psychological; the film does not have to deal with justice or with a documentary. Although it is a vernacular film, meaning it is about current slang, fashion and music, it is loaded with classical motifs. From the opening music, “Que Sera, Sera”, a performance made by Pink Martini, reeking of the mysterious, we feel that the city is under a spell. One explanation for this spell is grief. Campion shot the film in New York in the summer of 2002, less than a year after 9/11. Not that In the Cut is a film about the silhouette—Bebe and Campion are more interested in the pedestrians, the bodies that make themselves vulnerable to the will of the street. But the film is centered around fear and its erotic potential. It’s not scary at first when we learn that a body part has been found in Franny’s back garden. That’s where it belongs.
