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In the Cut
*
Cinema
Review - December 13, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. USA.
119 minutes. Directed by Jane Campion. Produced by Nicole Kidman, Laurie
Parker. Written by Jane Campion, Susannah Moore; based on the novel by Moore.
Starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Damici, Sharrief
Pugh, Sunrise Coigney, Michael Nuccio.
Maybe I was fooled by the hype and the music and
the visual strike, but I remember "The Piano" as one helluva movie. That
was ten years ago, and the once prolific Jane Campion has been working her
way down ever since. It took her three years to make "Portrait of a Lady",
another three to make the dreadfully confused "Holy Smoke!" and another four
to make this one, with which she finds her new low point. I know she's gone
into semi-retirement to concentrate on her kids, and that is fair enough
-- or it would be, if she kept in mind she has something to prove when she
now dips back into the cinema.
With "In the Cut" she has made a
movie of tortured souls and brooding, but one that fits into the genre of
erotic thriller, and features Meg Ryan and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Probably
she thinks that she is bringing artistic depth to the mainstream, and lyrically
showing the populist audience the inner workings of a troubled woman's heart.
What we actually have here is a movie that moves between the pretentious
and the incompetent, a sleazy straight-to-video-style sex and violence crapfest
which ends up simply laughable when it tries to go arty.
Ryan plays Frannie, a beaten-down thirtysomething
who teaches English to high school seniors. Near the start of the movie,
we learn there has been a murder in her neighbourhood. Mark Ruffalo plays
the detective who stops by to ask her questions. As he does, he asks if she's
a writer. She says she is. "Is that, like, a job or a hobby?" asks he. "It's
a passion!" says she.
The character's job in the early parts of the
film is to do a lot of this adolescent sincerity. She wanders around New
York City like she's at once in awe of the grand space and terrified by the
alien nature of it all. She sees poetry quotes on subway adverts, gets a
look in her eyes that suggests she's pausing to reflect on the awesome truth
and copies down extracts in her trusty little notebook. Her sister, played
by Leigh, confesses that she's been seeing a married doctor, and slept with
him seventeen times last week. Franny doesn't give her sober advice about
getting some self-respect or sorting out her life. What she does say is,
"You're a poet of love, a true free spirit!"
After a while it's hard to be surprised by sentences
like this, and we get the idea that Franny is a despicable slut. I don't
mean she sleeps with an enormous amount of men, and I am well aware of the
unsavoury nature of the world 'slut' and the double-standards it can stand
for, but here I cannot think of a better term. This woman is sexually liberated,
but she seems to get no pleasure out of sex, and chooses partners based on
who she can be most disgusted by afterwards. She slumps around the city and
goes hot and cold based on a basic lack of desire or feeling, or care about
her own body or soul. She is a vessel of self-imposed misery, a numb and
pointless sack of random actions and intangible notions.
In between wandering around looking sick of herself,
talking half-poetic nonsense, trying to shake off her creepy ex-lover and
having a relationship that may or may not be sexual with one of her students,
Franny conducts a steamy affair with the Ruffalo character. I think she's
attracted to him because he's gruff. He is certainly a more attractive bet
than his partner, who Franny talks to in a bar at one point, and asks, "Are
all cops homophobic?" His response: "Gee, you one of those feminist
types?"
Ruffalo and Ryan have some dirty sex scenes, where
neither partner seems sure if they're thrilled by each other or getting off
on the negative energy, and where Ryan can prove she's a serious actress
by taking her clothes off and moping. They don't seem to like each other
much, but they begin to rely on each other as the murder case gets closer
to home: More grisly things happen in the neighbourhood, someone close to
Ryan is harmed, she herself is chased through the street. Throughout all
of this is the implication that Ruffalo may be the murderer, although we
get three more red herring suspects, one of whom is obviously the killer,
the other two only existing to patronisingly fool the audience and pad out
the running time.
When the murderer is finally revealed, he doesn't
seem to have much motivation, except that he is in a plot about a murderer.
The screenplay has not even the grace to give him a good menacing speech.
It all ends with Franny whimpering and then returning to her apartment, where
the closing image, filled with blood and urine, is somehow supposed to be
cathartic.
But hey, this is the level we're at, and by that
point I was too grateful at the prospect of leaving to be any more numbed
or disgusted. "In the Cut" is a vile movie. I hated its close-up handheld
camerawork, which wants to communicate suffocated disorientation but looks
like amateurish sleaze. I hated its pompous lead character and the fact that
the movie, in its own faint, nonsensical way, somehow sees her as some kind
of noble victim. I hated the fact that it has only two black characters,
one a seeming threat, the other an eccentric deviant, both unable to speak
a verb without the word "be" in front. As in, "I be likin' biatches", "they
be trippin'" and "this movie be bein' a piece a shit".
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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