In The Cut stars Meg Ryan as Frannie, an English teacher who becomes involved with Malloy(Mark Ruffalo), a detective, when she witnesses the prelude to a murder.
The murderer dismembers and decapitates his victims, leaving rooms awash in blood, leaving few clues and giving the two characters an environment of threat and violence to carry out their sexually ambivalent courtship.
The film is populated, not with males and females, but with male desire and aggression and women’s uncertainty of both their attraction and repulsion to it.
For Frannie to push through this mist and find its source, its personality, rather than its inhuman and generic manifestations, she must first defeat the lies and deceit that formulates the buffer between one person and another. She must also vanquish the mistrust that guides her behaviour towards and around men.
Complicating the matter is the interaction of her own feminine desire – a creature peculiar in its fuel-air mixture volatility of fear and potency.
It’s a difficult film to watch. Violence and sex complete a seamless circle, one always eating the other, one always proceeding or following, one a garland of flowers around the others neck. A blow job before a beheading. Frannie getting robbed and hit by a car before her and Malloy play out his previous sexual experiences.
A line to remember: “I can remember every single guy I ever fucked by the way he wanted to do it. Not the way I wanted to do it.”
I cannot help but believe in the veracity of this statement, that the world is drenched in the male dictate, that we bias memory, make it ours while removing it from our understanding because it is almost always the mans way. Somehow we do not determine it, the air does - that mist that escapes from our pores.
In one of the final scenes Frannie finally brings her capacity for dominance to bear, handcuffing Malloy to a pipe and, as the characters put it, “fucking herself” with him sitting there impotent and unnecessary. Malloy tells her to get him out of the cuffs because “I’m starting to feel like a chick here”.
This is the one scene where Frannie is not overwhelmed by the overpowering presence of men and their prerogatives. Not surprisingly it immediately follows her finding her half sister’s head in a plastic bag, killed by the man who has stalked the film and its women for its entirety. This is her minor revenge. In the film sex and violence are always implied in the same visual sentence.
One of In The Cut’s most effective methods of indicting men as a whole is in a scene where Frannie is looking through mug shots at the police station after she has been robbed and hit by a car. You get the feeling that the crime could be less specific than the crime actually committed and that the faces in the mug shots might not be that important – the crime never having been committed by an individual.
Sex in this film the true crime, indistinguishable from the decapitations and gun shots, the accosting of the female characters at every turn, by men on the streets, by men staring intently and inhumanly in a strip joint, by ex-lovers that refuse rejection, etc. The difference being that sex is a crime that we cannot help but want and desire.
All this is in opposition to the colour robed beauty of the film. Its form is constituted of hues that draw definitions, separate objects with soft dusted hands, sharp colours that delineate boundaries where morality cannot.
Campion (Jane Campion, the director) always blurs the edges, perhaps in an attempt to soften the severity of the content, but the colours are always victorious, pushing through human vagaries and affectations. They remind us of a world that exists beyond our own perceptions and crimes.
When we do find the beautiful in the human, we find it as depersonalised traces, billboards on trains, poetic and ethereal – a quote from Dante, a Chinese proverb on passion and advertisement copy that reads like a love letter. These are beautiful in their removal from their sources. Malloy is at his most poetic when he’s on his cell phone.
I found this film disturbing to watch because of its representation of the predatory nature of masculinity and the alienation it must taint feminine existence with. Watching this film I could momentarily inhabit the terror that women must periodically experience.
I know that it’s a film, that life is not as bad as what's shown through this warped window (but it can be), that guilt and complicity are not our only conditions. My own fears give a queasy momentum to the themes it studies. My fear that in every male there is something so universal, so overpowering, that the flimsy membrane of skin and self-control we have been given can not indefinitely hold it in check (does not hold it in check). Watching this film I witnessed a distillation of this thing, this common heritage and I recognise its potentiality, its non-individuality.
I will tell you this – if you want to continue trusting the men that live next to, above and below you, the men that pass you by on the street, then DO NOT WATCH THIS FILM. Frannie is only given the luxury of trusting a male after she has killed one.
Be warned.
