Ready to Rent Ready to Rent (March 05, 2004)

In the Cut

Columbia/Tri-Star Home Video VHS & DVD 1 hr 59 mins Director: Jane Campion

Director Jane Campion's "In the Cut" is a ridiculous mixture of pedestrian serial killer drama coupled with strange feminist overtones, all filtered through the mad-poetic haze of Campion's frustrating persona. The film centers around Meg Ryan's stuffy Frannie, a New York schoolteacher whose scars in dealing with her father's abandonment has left an echo of distance with her relationships with other men. Frannie has half-retreated into another world of emotional signs, where an advertisement's quoting of Yeats is a signal from the heavens for Frannie as a guide through each chapter in her life. Frannie collects these quotes, which mark the chapter breaks for the film.

"In the Cut" starts with a waking dream of Frannie's, a tree shedding its bloom and her half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) reveling in its splendor. It is in this dream that Frannie is trapped, it seems, for the rest of the film, between youth and middle-age, where the passage is ruled by the Minotaur, a killer prowling the neighborhood. The police are the bearers of the darker element in Frannie's dream, particularly Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), who introduces physical desire into Frannie's dream, not only for sexual intimacy but for emotional. Frannie, in a twist out of every B-movie clichŽ, begins to suspect Malloy of being the killer but never calls off the relationship. It is here that "In the Cut" treads between highbrow bunk and the typical "women in peril" trash that kills any attempt that the film makes toward becoming either.

Jane Campion, like many "serious" arthouse directors such as Peter Greenaway or Lars Von Trier, is either a genius or an emotional misanthrope, or both. Watching one of Campion's films, especially "Portrait of a Lady," is for me like being beaten with a velvet glove while someone babbles in an unknown tongue. I think I understand Campion's concepts but it is too painful a process to learn more about them. To be fair, however, Campion's style worked for her in the case of "In the Cut." Because the serial killer genre has been beaten to death (in at least two films a month), with some sort of societal metaphor lurking in the background of all of them, "In the Cut" is at least the most stylish. Also the sexual encounters in the film, surprisingly, do not have an exploitative air. They actually depict two smart people that have sex because they, well, are attracted to each other and look to the other for clues to solve their own private mysteries. This type of frankness in the film is actually why I recommend "In the Cut." Campion, I feel, for once may have chalked up her characters to heavy-handed symbols that feel fabricated from a psychology and mythology textbook. But although they may act ludicrous, they never once lose their humanistic credibility. -Joe Ramirez

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