In the Cut

 In Jane Campion's grim erotic thriller, In the Cut (2003), women want to be rescued by strong, competent men; there is only one problem, it is these same strong, competent men who pose the very threat from which rescue is needed.  In the Cut is very gloomy, poorly paced, and, even, dull -- it is, however, a work of art that raises certain challenging questions and, for that reason, probably worth enduring.  Re-evaluating this movie, which flopped badly with reviewers and at the box office, contemporary critics observe that Campion's scrupulously feminist vision repudiates the "male gaze" that supposedly configures movies by men and substitutes a woman's way of looking at the world.  I don't know exactly what the "male gaze" is supposed to be and remain skeptical as to whether vision is  gendered.  However, I think I know what is meant by these concepts in the terms of this specific movie; the male gaze is penetrating, acquisitive, voyeuristic and lustful; by contrast, the female gaze is hypervigilant and regards each man as a potential rapist, assailant, or murderer -- as we watch, In the Cut, Campion engineers the movie so that every male figure, without exception, is a potential sex murderer; we flinch every time a man appears.  Of course, in order to make this conceit operable, Campion (and her writer Susanna Moore, the author of the book on which this movie is based) must imagine the female characters as all potential victims.  And this is the film's strategy, a claustrophobic representation of the world as an inferno in which all women are yielding, soft, and compromised by male lust; all men are brutes with only one thing on their minds.  This is a plausible representation of the world, although, of course, radically incomplete and everyone in the movie is portrayed in gender stereotypes that would be truly deplorable if the film weren't so obviously a lurid fantasy.  And, of course, it must be said that there is always some truth to a caricature, otherwise we wouldn't be able to recognize its subject.  

Frannie, played by Megan Ryan, lives in NYC, in the East Village.  She is a schoolteacher working with teenagers and, apparently, writing a book on urban slang.  Frannie lives above a billiard hall that is a very peculiar place -- called The Red Turtle, the pool hall is frequented entirely by Black thugs and their beautiful White girlfriends, who lounge around in evening gowns.  (I think the girls probably are strippers who work in a nearby club and spend their free time shooting pool with their pimps -- but, who knows?  Nothing makes much sense about the film's physical environs.) It's post 9-11, and there are flags hanging everywhere, banners that Campion shoots against urban ruins and filth with an ironic and jaundiced eye.  Frannie has a half-sister -- the girls' father was married four times -- and this young woman lives above a strip tease club where she also seems to work, possibly as a bartender or waitress; we don't ever see her on-stage  As in Martin Scorsese's great After Hours, there's trouble in this Soho neighborhood; the cops keep finding body-arts of "disarticulated" young women in the alleyways and gardens -- in fact, a head has been found dropped in the garden behind Frannie's house.  

After spending the night with her half-sister, Pauline (played by a pouting Jennifer Jason Leigh), Frannie goes with one of her students to the Red Turtle pool hall, apparently to discuss a paper that she has assigned to the young Black student with whom she is flirting.  The boy comes on a bit strong and so Frannie to escape from him goes into the basement to the toilet.  The basement is a house of horrors, dank, dark, and full of concealing shadows.  Frannie sees a man receiving oral sex from a young woman; implausibly, she's not able to see his face, but detects a black 3 of Spades tattoo on his forearm.  Later, she is confronted by an aggressive detective and his obnoxious partner  investigating the serial killing and mutilation of local prostitutes. The detective, Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), rudely interrogates her, insults her as well and, then, asks her out.  The guy is so obnoxious that no one in their right mind would give him the time of day -- but Frannie thinks he's cute and he exudes cocky rescuer vibes, and, so, of course, she agrees to meet him for a drink.  At the bar, the cop's even more nasty partner shows up drunk and the detectives take turns making vicious misogynistic remarks, hugging and kissing one another in rather strange displays of male bonding, and, then, insulting her some more.  Needless to say Frannie flees the encounter only to be groped and mugged on the street by a man in a ski-mask and black jogging suit.  (The streets are filthy, often wet with floating garbage, and decorated with obscene and sinister graffiti -- the city is like Scorsese's inferno in Taxi Driver.)  Malloy, the sexist detective, interviews her at her apartment, where, one thing leading to another, he ends up performing cunnilingus on our heroine a tergo and, then, has some spectacular intercourse with her --this scene is protracted, involves very cringeworthy dialogue (Malloy learned his oral sex skills from an older woman called "the chicken lady"), and features lots of very explicit full frontal nudity, both male and female.  We have earlier seen Frannie masturbating to her memories of the first encounter with this cop, a perfect specimen of toxic masculinity, and, so, we know that he makes her really hot.  (Frannie violates her own advice to poor Pauline; Pauline has been ghosted by her doctor that she has slept with and is stalking the physician.  Frannie says that she should just masturbate and not have sex with every guy that she desires.)  Frannie and Malloy's sexual encounters are entangled with the police investigation of the serial killings and the plot assigns suspicion to every man that appears:  Frannie's previous boyfriend, who also dresses in scrubs as a doctor (but I think he's just acting the part in a soap opera) is stalking her, breaks into apartment and constantly threatens her -- at one point, he suggests he'll kill his nasty little terrier-chihuahua mix if she doesn't come around to having sex with him again.  Frannie's student is writing an essay on the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy, whom he proclaims to be innocent, writing the paper in his own blood.  (Later this kid comes to see Frannie who obligingly necks with him but, then, flees in horror when he takes the cue and tries to rape her.)  Frannie's sister, Pauline, gets butchered.  Frannie cradles Pauline's severed head, concealed in a plastic grocery sack, and ends up being interrogated by the awful detectives.  There's nothing like a decapitation of close family member to get the juices flowing.  Frannie decides to have sex with Malloy and handcuffs him to a convenient nearby stanchion in her apartment.  She accuses Malloy of murdering her sister -- he inexplicably has her room key (suggesting that Malloy and Pauline are also sexually involved).  Also, Malloy has part of Frannie's charm bracelet, a domestic piece of jewelry featuring a wedding cake, a little cottage, and a silver perambulator with infant inside.  This seems to be a souvenir that Malloy has taken to commemorate his sexual interludes with Frannie, but she interprets this as further evidence that he may be the serial killer, hence, the handcuffs. (Frannie has also seen that Malloy has the 3 of Spades seen previously in cellar of the Red Turtle tattooed on his forearm.)  After some more garish sex between the handcuffed Malloy and Frannie, the real murdered pays a call and the film is set up for its gruesome climax.  (Of course, Malloy can't rescue Frannie this time because he is hors de combat due to the handcuffs.  Pleading to be released from the cuffs, Malloy says:  "Get me out of this. I'm starting to feel like a chick.")  If this seems ridiculous, it is.  However, it also must be said that the more serious a film is about sex, the more ridiculous -- consider, for instance, Last Tango in Paris.  And this film is no rom-com -- it's in deadly earnest with respect to sex and gender.   (Campion explored this same subject in greater detail and with much more sophistication in her New Zealand mini-series shown between 2013 and 2017, Top of the Lake, an excellent crime show featuring both toxic masculinity and equally poisonous female characters.)

Campion's filmmaking is impeccable.  The movie is shot in very tense,  jittery style with quick cutting.  Campion edits on motion and, so, the act of someone sitting down may be fractured into three cubist-style shots.  The surface of the film is turgid, congested, full of digressive images that appear as if only half-glimpsed.  An example is a twitchy subway scene (of which there are many) in which we see two men carrying a huge round bouquet of flowers labeled "MOM" -- at first, the big red wheel seems inexplicable but, then, we realize that it is a funeral wreath. Cityscapes shot over the rooftops contain pointless reframing motions, little jerks and hitches, and New York is a hellscape full of shadowy villains, pimps, and hookers standing in dirty puddles of water.  The bravura pictorial style and razor-sharp cutting conceals the film's shallow thesis (all women are masochistic victims, all men abusive rapists) and gives the picture an eerie gravitas that the pulp plot doesn't really merit.  As an example of the movie's pervasive darkness, the action is interspersed with sepia silent film shots of Victorian men and women skating on ice in a snowstorm -- Campion's sense of time is blurry; given the age of her characters the courtship of Franny's mother as shown in the silent film inserts would have taken place around 1965; but the point, I think, is valid:  we perceive of our parent's youth and courtship as existing in a storied, half-mythological "before-time" and this is reflected in the herky-jerky pastiche of silent film used to depict the ice-skating scenes.  Franny's apartment is stifling and she falls asleep leaning against her open refrigerator door.  In her dream, she sees her parents' courtship on the ice which ends with her father's ice skates first cutting off her mother's feet and, then, slicing through her neck.  (When the film's title, "In the Cut" is flashed on screen, Franny's father makes a sudden turn on the frozen lake and we hear the blades of the skates cutting deeo into the ice.)

I always watch the credits.  The movie was made entirely in New York City, probably about a year after the Twin Towers were destroyed.  In the "Thank You" credit, thanks are given to Gwyneth Paltrow and Harvey Weinstein.