2003 Directed by Jane Campion
Following the gruesome murder of a young woman in her neighborhood, a self-determined woman living in New York City – as if to test the limits of her own safety – propels herself into an impossibly risky sexual liaison. Soon she grows increasingly wary about the motives of every man with whom she has contact – and about her own.
Meg Ryan Mark Ruffalo Jennifer Jason Leigh Nick Damici Sharrieff Pugh Heather Litteer Kevin Bacon Michael Nuccio Allison Nega Dominick Aries Susan Gardner Daniel T. Booth Yaani King Mondschein Frank Harts Sebastian Sozzi Zach Wegner Patrice O'Neal Arthur J. Nascarella Funda Duval Theo Kogan Sandy Vital Sharon Riggins Karen Riggins Nancy La Scala Ami Goodheart Panicker Upendran Kendra A. Zimmerman Michelle Hurst Sunrise Coigney Show All…
In the Cut - Wenn Liebe tötet, En carne viva
"Some women give terrible blowjobs. No rhythm at all. No sense of cock whatsoever."
takes the erotic thriller, a lurid campy and frequently misogynistic genre and recontextualises it to be a feminine and haunting portrayal of a woman's sexuality, with the luridness coming from her desires, her sexual interactions, her satisfactions. campion's formalism here is magnificent, she creates constant unease with her lens by using hazy focusing, constant handheld camera and zooms and almost delirious editing, plays like a low budget domino at points. she captures the filthiness of these streets and their inhabitants perfectly, and uses her almost abstract presentation to its fullest potential in the more erotic/tense sequences. ryan's body is not there to be ogled at, its sexual but not objectifying, her orgasm is important for her not for the audience's…
sharp objects minus the munchausen and messina! jane campion explores the dangers that tag along with being a woman laden with desire — dismemberment, decapitation, death. though this story isn’t technically true, it mirrors the true crime genre by explicitly showing the aftermath of brutal serial killings, forcing the audience to witness the horrors that men do in fact impart on women’s bodies (oh yeah, i read I’ll Be Gone In The Dark!).
after watching this and Top of the Lake, i so wish campion (and women directors in general) had the opportunity to do more “true” crime — so refreshing to watch through a non-exploitative lens, never worrying about whether or not the director gets off on the violence. (well ... not to imply that campion doesn’t, because this is definitely more erotic thriller than crime drama. full-frontal ruffalo!)
victim of desire. the trashy paperback erotic thriller stylistically fractured, blurred and discolored into something that feels even ickier; psychologically navigating a world where your pleasure comes attached to the power and perversions of men ("im scared of what i want"), a world where the skin of a lover and a dismembered body part can look very similar.
nothing I want to write about this movie will allow me to keep my job as an English teacher named Fran. anyway, it's so funny that Mark Ruffalo is from Kenosha
The FATAL ATTRACTION-style erotic thriller is of course in Campion's hands an intrinsically misogynist construct but what's most interesting is that the conventionally "feminist" romanticism that would normally be considered a response on its own, with those storms of flower petals and purple voice-over poetry, is here equally limiting in its lack of any real aggression. This is a pretty thorough reclamation of female sexual agency that has the good sense to delight in the most tantalizing and frequently silly genre tropes (highlight: dismembered corpse in the washing machine) and even make room for some intentional camp (I'm looking at you, most of Mark Ruffalo's dialogue).
I often think about Meg Ryan. What happened to her career is one of the most depressing developments in Hollywood in the last few decades. First, Ryan cheated on her unfaithful husband. When a man has an affair, it's not a big deal. But a woman? Well, she just isn't allowed to do that. A man continues to get work, a woman loses her reputation. She then made this movie and delivered a good performance but people were so used to her "America's sweetheart" persona they dismissed her efforts to do something different as her wanting to be "edgy". And then there were "interviews" like this one. Ryan had to continuously defend her choice to star in this film and…
Never felt the urge to revisit this film until recently, as it’s reputation has shifted. On a plot level, it’s still dumb as a box of rocks, no more dignified than the average sexy thriller that were a dime-a-dozen the decade before. But now it’s clear that no history of this subgenre could be written without it, and I felt a newfound appreciation for its explicitness and audaciousness as an allegory about how women have to navigate the world of men, in all its volatility and violence. Have to love Campion for lighting fire to studio money. YOLO!
"How many ladies have to die to make it good?"
"At least three."
Campion films this using various methods that slur in an out of Frannie's perspective: handheld shots; POV close-ups of intense, fixated gazes; shifts in film speed that draw out or chop over various focal lengths that literally blur our perspective. Operating in a genre known for its misogyny, Campion not only refuses to revise it by stripping out lust but instead she triples down on sexual hunger. This is an erotic thriller in which everything is eroticized, every glance and pause. Dion Beebe does a loose dry run for his work for Michael Mann here, parlaying his intense color saturation and tactile texture into impressionistic flashes.
The…
I must admit In the Cut is an aesthetically ugly film—drenched in a greenish hue, it looks like early-aughts James Wan trying to be David Fincher. But knowing the looks of Campion’s other films, I have to imagine the ugliness was an intentional attempt to give the film’s New York setting a seedy veneer. This is not the concrete jungle where dreams are made of—instead, it’s a New York where leering men lurk at every corner (including a stalker-ish Kevin Bacon) and women are murdered and dismembered. Perhaps Campion was making a statement about the ugliness of the genre itself, as erotic thrillers too often leer at women with lascivious cinematography and dismember them—if not literally as murder victims then figuratively, by filming women's body parts in a context-less vacuum.
I wrote about this for my column over at Broadly.
