Taglines: Everything you know about desire is dead wrong.
Frannie Avery is a New York City inner city high school English teacher, whose passion is collecting words and phrases that interest her, either because of their meaning and/or just because of the way they sound. The way that she and her paternal half sister Pauline Avery, her closest confidante, deal with men and sex has largely been affected by their father, who is working on marrying wife number five.
Frannie thinks about sex more than she has it. Her lack of a sex life is further exacerbated by being the object of obsession of James Graham, a man with who she had a few casual dates and two sexual encounters, which has made her even more cautious. This complete experience is why she has a somewhat inappropriate, albeit non-sexual relationship with Cornelius Webb, one of her students. She eventually embarks on a sexual relationship with NYPD Homicide Detective Giovanni Malloy, who, along with his partner Detective Ritchie Rodriguez, are investigating the murder of a young woman, part of whose disarticulated body was found in the garden outside of Frannie’s apartment.
Malloy believes this murder is the work of a serial killer, as another similar murder took place a year ago. Frannie was largely taken by Malloy, despite his crude come-on, because of something she had witnessed at a bar a few days prior. Beyond the murder investigation, she continues her association with Malloy despite she catching him in a lie which may have dangerous implications. As they progress in their sexual relationship, she discovers more and more evidence pointing to him being the serial killer. She has to reconcile the feelings she has for him against she possibly being the next victim if he is indeed the killer.
In the Cut is a 2003 Australian-American mystery and erotic thriller film written and directed by Jane Campion and starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Campion’s screenplay is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Susanna Moore. The film focuses on a college English professor who becomes entangled with a detective investigating a series of gruesome murders in her Manhattan neighborhood.
The film received a limited release on 22 October 2003 in the United States, and was subsequently given a wide release on Halloween that year in the United States and United Kingdom. The film received mixed to negative reviews from most critics[1] but has some respected admirers.
Nicole Kidman and Jane Campion spent five years developing the film. This is Kidman’s producing debut. Kidman was originally cast as Frannie, but dropped out because she was divorcing and needed more time with her children.
Film Review for In the Cut
Once upon a time there were two kinds of sex – written sex (something you read about) and oral sex (something you talked about). Then oral sex escaped from the Pandora’s box of John Updike novels and is to be found everywhere from the White House to the Tate Gallery, and now it has entered mainstream Hollywood cinema. Some recent articles, citing among other films Jane Campion’s murky thriller In the Cut, have even suggested that this represents a new maturity in American movies.
The film’s heroine is a literary lady, Frannie (Meg Ryan), who teaches a New York college course in modern fiction (her inattentive students think she’s set them a paper on ‘Stream of Conscience’). She’s researching a book on black sexual slang, and is fascinated by the words of the prophets written on subway walls in the form of poems by Dante, Lorca et al quoted in underground carriages.
Her other passion, arising from a troubled childhood, is sex, and in the opening minutes of the picture she has a graphic view of a man with an odd tattoo on his wrist being fellated by a woman in a dark basement lavatory of a bar. The woman is murdered that night outside Frannie’s home by a serial killer who decapitates his victims after putting an engagement ring on their fingers.
And before you can say ‘police line-up’, Frannie becomes the lover of Giovanni Malloy, a boorish homicide detective assigned to the case, played by Mark Ruffalo, who looks like Burt Reynolds and talks like Sylvester Stallone. He performs cunnilingus upon her, and when she inquires where he learnt this art he explains his sexual education in some detail. ‘Gobble, gobble’, as Jennifer Lopez put it so eloquently in Gigli.
As in most Jane Campion movies, the heroine is at the mercy of insensitive predatory males, and almost anyone around here, from Detective Malloy, who is Frannie’s principal suspect, to her demented ex-lover-turned-stalker (Kevin Bacon), might be the killer. The plotting and police procedural aspects of In the Cut are perfunctory and unconvincing, and for all its air of breaking new ground, it is ploughing down some familiar furrows.
It’s now 25 years since Looking for Mr Goodbar, where Diane Keaton played a schoolteacher from a disturbed home getting involved with homicidal psychopaths while engaging in transgressive sex in Manhattan. A similar time has elapsed since a much better film, The Eyes of Laura Mars, starring Faye Dunaway as a sensational fashion photographer (her pictures courtesy of Helmut Newton) who develops a bizarre association with a cop and a serial killer. It will, of course, be said that they were directed by men. With In the Cut we have a star drastically changing her style and a feminist director engaging with once taboo subjects. You can almost hear them singing a rasping duet of ‘Non, je ne regrette Ryan’.
In the Cut (2003)
Directed by: Jane Campion
Starring: Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Allison Nega, Yaani King, Heather Litteer, Zach Wegner, Sebastian Sozzi, Daniel T. Booth, Susan Gardner
Screenplay by: Jane Campion, Susanna Moore
Production Design by: David Brisbin
Cinematography by: Dion Beebe
Film Editing by: Alexandre de Franceschi
Costume Design by: Beatrix Aruna Pasztor
Set Decoration by: Andrew Baseman
Music by: Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexuality including explicit dialogue, nudity, graphic crime scenes and language.
Distributed by: Sony ScreenGems
Release Date: October 31, 2003
Visits: 73
