“I’m sure she’s an air sign,” said my astrological friend, looking at a picture of Australian director Jean Campion. Such judgements are beyond my expertise, but the link of Campion with air made me think that her new film, In the Cut, does have something airy about it. This despite the fact that it’s an “erotic thriller”, with a certain amount of gore and a certain amount of carefully provocative sex in it.
In the Cut is based on the bestselling novel by Susanna Moore, who co-wrote the script with Campion. Its central character is Frannie (Meg Ryan), who is a creative-writing teacher living in a less than salubrious part of New York. A murder, in which a woman is horribly mutilated, takes place nearby, and a hunky policeman, Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), comes to investigate. A sexual obsession develops. But there is something edgy about it, as though Frannie and Malloy’s mutual attraction has something to do with the dance of killer and victim.
The basic constituents of a noir mystery are present, but Campion and Moore use them largely as scaffolding for a meditation on issues of sex, death, guilt and power, not to mention the opposition of body and mind. This is what used to be called a “psychological thriller”, meaning slow. (It reminds one of the old joke, if it was a joke, about feminist objections to narrative thrust — it’s a male plot.)
In the Cut is a finely made film, with darkly beautiful passages, but it’s somehow airy — too light for itself. Campion’s most successful film to date, The Piano, was very watery, in the sense of liquid rather than diluted (maybe she’s a water sign?), and In the Cut wants, I think, to be earthy. But it isn’t.
In Moore’s novel, the earthiness of the sex is contradicted by the cerebral tone of the first-person narration. Everything that happens is filtered through Frannie’s obsession with language, and the language of the novel is itself a vital player in the drama. The film, of course, almost entirely loses that. One can see why: reams of voice-over are tiresome, but showing Frannie reading a few poems on the subway is no substitute for the intense self-consciousness of the novel’s voice.
And here is the film’s central problem. As in last week’s movie of the week, The Mother, there is a central absence here. Without the novel’s language and without a commanding performance from Ryan (how ever hard she’s trying to play against the squeaky-clean type), we have no way of knowing what is going on in Frannie’s head. She is, in fact, pretty much a blank. A patch of air.
Maybe she’s supposed to be sort of mysterious, but if so she’s too mysterious. It’s hard to work out why she’s doing what she’s doing; a couple of fantasy flashbacks to her childhood don’t help much. She seems not to have had a life.
Her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a much more interesting character in the movie, simply because she’s more alive. Leigh’s very body seems to contain more history than Ryan’s. The hard-bitten but sexually expert cop, played with a smoulder by Ruffalo, is easier to read than either of the women — perhaps because he’s familiar from lots of other movies.
But overall it’s hard to work out what Campion and Moore are trying to do, or to say, which makes In the Cut interesting but frustrating. Perhaps the uncertainty is theirs, though, before it’s ours. The ending gives a clue: it won’t matter to those who haven’t read the novel, but its conclusion and that of the movie are strikingly different. In the book, it’s the kind of shock ending that makes you mentally revise everything you’ve read so far. The movie, on the other hand, suddenly shows a new interest in those thriller conventions it has been half-heartedly flirting with, and resolves itself thus. In a way, you could argue that they have chosen a masculine ending (forcible plot closure) over the feminine possibility, which would, presumably, have dealt with the emotional issues the movie raises. So one is left puzzled and unsatisfied.
And when, in memory, one tries to grasp at the film, it simply seems to float away.