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IN
THE CUT
6/10
USA (US/Aus)
2003 : Jane CAMPION : 119 mins
An ambitious
art-movie/mainstream-thriller hybrid, In the Cut is a fascinating
failure that falls awkwardly between two stools: too luridly, gruesomely
melodramatic for highbrow audiences, but too artsy and slow for multiplex
popcorn-munchers. This is the kind of thing the French do very well –
it’s easy to imagine, say, Isabelle Huppert in the central role of Franny,
a late-thirties/early-forties literature professor in Manhattan whose
entanglement in the hunt for a serial killer coincides with her sexual
re-awakening.
As it is, Meg
Ryan acquits herself well enough in a role originally intended for Nicole
Kidman, who’s made a habit of exiting Manhattan-set woman-in-peril movies
- Jodie Foster stepped into Kidman’s shoes for Panic
Room. But while David Fincher crafted a thumpingly effective,
visually stunning thriller with enough cinematic intelligence to transcend
its genre roots and plot-holes, Campion ends up with a great-looking movie
– thanks largely to Dion Beebe’s cinematography – that’s watchable enough
at the time, but in retrospect a very rickety concoction.
For the first
hour, the film is absorbing and often dazzling as Campion takes us right
into Franny’s head: sublimating her sexual needs into her work, Franny
is unusually receptive to her environment. She takes the time to read
poetry-extracts on the subway, and is constantly scribbling quotations
– alongside street-slang sexual euphimisms for a book she’s writing. Campion
presents a crime-ridden metropolis full of grace notes, epiphanies, the
possibility of transcendence – right from the opening scene, in which
Franny’s Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, underused) enjoys a ‘petal storm’
in Franny’s garden.
Both sisters
are pleasantly surprised when the slightly frumpy Franny drifts into a
relationship with Malloy (Mark Ruffalo, in Freddy Mercury moustache),
the blue-collar homicide detective investigating a series of grisly murders
in the locality. Though very different personalities, Franny and Malloy’s
affair is an intensely physical one – until circumstances conspire to
suggest Malloy may in fact be the killer. As Franny struggles between
passion and suspicion, events take a shatteringly tragic turn…
It’s at this
point – not long after the hour mark – that the wheels start to come off
the wagon. Campion has managed to sustain In the Cut as an intriguing,
slow-burning character-study mood-piece, but when the nuts-and-bolts mechanics
of the thriller plot kick in, the director – and her co-scriptwriter Susanna
Moore (adapting her own novel) – founders. The film increasingly resembles
a throwback to 1970s liberated-woman-in-danger films like Klute, Eyes
of Laura Mars and Looking For Mr Goodbar, tarted up with fancy
visuals, poetry references, feminist undertones and shots of the American
flag for that irresistible post-9/11 cheap gravitas. (Never mind the ‘screeners’
brouhaha - the Motion Picture Association of America should seriously
consider a two-year moratorium on the Stars & Stripes.)
The climax
is especially clunky: Campion and Moore deserve credit for avoiding the
usual heroic-male-saves-damsel-in-distress finale by having Franny do
all the saving herself, but the means by which the hero is incapacitated
(a sudden detour into S+M) smacks heavily of contrivance. And Franny’s
showdown with the killer is a badly botched affair – leaving us with the
moral that brainy women should consider gun lessons.
In the simple
terms of whodunnit, however, In the Cut works – the script conceals
the culprit’s identity till the last minute, and does so without resorting
to cheat devices (like having the killer too peripheral, or unseen altogether).
The task of solving the mystery is complicated by an unlikely coincidence,
but it’s not in the same league as the wild improbability on which Mystic
River pivots. As a whydunnit, however, the film is unsatisfying
– the motives for the killing spree remain very muddy, ,though perhaps
this is appropriate in a production whose visuals and sound-design hover
so alluringly between the limpid and the opaque.
One element
of the film’s look remain baffling – the bizarre intrusion into so many
shots of the boom microphone. The classic hallmark of low-budget carelessness,
it’s startling to see so many boom-intrusions such an expensive, prestige
major-studio production. But such is the frequency and severity of these
maddeningly distracting intrusions (most blatantly when Ryan leans out
of her apartment window to converse with someone below) you wonder whether
they’re deliberate. In a film with a subtext (albeit gratuitous and undeveloped)
about the proliferation of sexual imagery in language and visuals, could
Campion perhaps be making some kind of point about ‘phallic intrusion’
into Franny’s world? Could she possibly be trying to inject what one character,
referring to oral sex, calls ‘a sense of cock’?
23rd
October, 2003
(seen 22nd October : Tyneside
Cinema, Newcastle)
by Neil
Young
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