In the Cut

Synopsis: Frannie (Meg Ryan) is a teacher learning about the underside of life, and a brutal neighbourhood murder brings her into contact with Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), with dramatic consequences. [Jane Campion, 2003, USA, Rating R, Running time: 118 minutes]

In The Cut is dark, emotional, sexual, violent, tragically beautiful and revelatory material. It opens with a ‘petal storm’, something that seems too lovely to be real. Yet as I walked through the park this morning, a gust of warm breeze shook petals from the blossom trees and they whirled past me like snow. It was just like the film. The film was just like this. Visceral, immediate. The almost constantly shifting camera and focus captures the energy and essence of people and landscape. Focus shifts as the eye shifts, the relative position of things move as the body moves, small details carry weight, and even wide city streets can be claustrophobic with cars, people, urban detritus.

And like life, the film doesn’t conveniently deliver its meanings on a plate. It makes little deliberate effort at exposition, relying instead on the unfolding events to demonstrate who characters are, what they are like, what they might be capable of. The intensity of these gradually unfolding unknowns combined with the unsettling camera and urban sound effortlessly create a very ominous tone.

Meg Ryan looks very little like herself as Frannie, and more – if anything – like Nicole Kidman. This is somewhat disconcerting given that Kidman bought the rights to the film planning to play the lead herself. Frannie is understated, intense, on the edge of discovering herself. Ryan’s comic roles can be terrific, even if they can seem spread into a thin veneer. She now reveals a substantially different talent and potential, as well as revealing just about everything else in the tingling sexual peaks of the film. Mark Ruffalo plays the brooding detective, with alternately ugly indifference and surprising compassion. Other performances also capture unfamiliar energy, with Jennifer Jason Leigh and the uncredited Kevin Bacon both surprising and outstanding.

Frannie is preoccupied with words, from the detective’s description of the corpse as ‘disarticulated’ to the snatches of poetry on the walls in the subway. Her vicariously academic interests are in street culture and slang, but her own life becomes increasingly complicated after two key events - watching an explicit blow-job in a seedy bar which awakens a new level of desire, and becoming linked to a murder investigation. As she becomes more emotionally involved, she is beset by visions (spliced into the film) of the moment in which her parents fell in love, a moment which later led to betrayal and abandonment.

The only criticism might be that the plot is at times implausible or slightly unsubtle, but this is a film more about the psyche than who did it. Perhaps it should be added that the aftermath of the murders is graphic, the sex is explicit, and the end is different from the book.

4.5 flims.