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.

Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto Del Fauno)

Synopsis: A fanciful and grotesque fantasy entwined around a snapshot of Spain’s 1930s civil war that Del Toro describes as both the movie that most resembles the things he thought he would do when he began directing and as an informal sequel to the issues and themes of his similarly horrifying film, The Devil’s Backbone (2001) [Guillermo del Toro, 2006, USA,
Rating R, Running time 119 minutes]

Pan’s Labyrinth opens with a voice-over describing an underground realm in which a king awaits the return of his long-lost daughter who had ventured above ground where the sun had blotted out her memory, leaving her spirit to move through the world of humans. This sounds like the beginning of any classic fairy story with its divisions between good and evil and a fall that contains the possibility of a return to grace. But it’s also an allegory for Franco’s Spain, where insurgents hope for a restoration of their own, the two aspects together making for a sadistically brutal yet compellingly imaginative combination.

The story begins with young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her pregnant mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), arriving at a rural Spanish military outpost. Ofelia is quickly terrorized by both her new step-father, the Commandant, and the challenges set for her by a faun who appears to her in a mysterious maze. The Commandant is ruthlessly and sadistically attempting to quell local insurgents and his attitude towards his new and ailing wife is also brutal, telling the doctor to save the baby boy rather than the mother should her illness worsen. Meanwhile, Ofelia moves in and out of a fantastic world where the intimidating faun presents her with many challenges all the while promising that he can return her to her rightful place as princess of the underworld.

This remarkable fantasy reverberates in the mind days and weeks after viewing, and questions about what was real and unreal will linger. The screen is alive with Del Toro’s childhood fears, the monstrous things that have leapt and crawled from his sketchbook, and his painstakingly-crafted visual effects and storytelling. While ‘fantasy’ suggests something desirable or even titillating, Ofelia faces frighteningly monstrous beasts - the creaking, ancient faun; the gigantic toad in a sea of millipedes; the menacing stillness of the Pale Man with eyes in his palms. Yet her greatest horror is the Commandant, someone who should have been born with some humanity yet shows none at all.

The cinematography shifts effortlessly between the real and the fantastic, and the special effects are, simply, very special. Doug Jones, the mime artist beneath many films’ prosthetic suits, brings creatures of a terribly inhuman form to life. And the fanciful story is made real by convincing performances by Baquero and Gil together with Sergi López (Dirty Pretty Things) as Capitán Vidal, and Maribel Verdú (Y Tu Mamá También) as the rebellious maid, Mercedes.

Pan’s Labyrinth makes no effort to turn away from the brutality of its story, even if a few cuts or different camera angles could have avoided the R-rating. The Commandant beats a man’s face to a pulp with a bottle, tortures another to a state worse than death. A man has his cheek slashed from mouth to ear and then stitches it himself. Would it have been better to cut a few moments and let teenagers in to see some real fantasy, an alternative to the sanitised Narnia or Harry Potter? Or does a director need explicit images to make the audience flinch, to make his cinematic vision truly, really, horrible? As it is, be prepared to close your eyes.

4.5 flims.