DIRECTED
BY Jane Campion
STARRING
Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh
US 2003
118 mins.
There
was a Spanish film about 10 years ago (I think it starred Carmen Maura) called How
to Be a Woman and Not Die in the Attempt. It’s a title that could easily
apply to both this week’s films [NB. The other one was Something's Gotta
Give] – especially In The Cut, in which Meg Ryan consciously
changes her image, dyes her hair a sensible shade of brown and gets stalked
around New York by a faceless killer, misogynist cops and radical feminist
theory, more or less in that order.
Film
culture has always been male-dominated – partly because the whole world was
male-dominated till relatively recently, but also because of the premium it
places on the role of the director. He’s supposed to be a boss as much as an
artist – and it usually is a ‘he’, conventional wisdom claiming that a
woman doesn’t have the authority to bark orders and command respect from burly
electricians. It’s all changing, of course, but there’s still a part of film
culture that’s very laddish – the Matrix-style blockbusters, comic-book
heroes and list-obsessed magazines like Empire and Total Film,
counting down the ‘50 Best Action Scenes of All Time’. It’s no accident
that ‘chick flick’ is a term of derision.
In
The Cut is no
ordinary chick flick. It’s an Art film dressed as a thriller, made by a woman
– Jane Campion, who won an Oscar for The Piano – and feeding on a
woman’s anxieties. It starts on menacing images of fences and railings, scored
with a rather atonal version of ‘Que Sera Sera’. Frannie (that’s Meg) is
our heroine, a repressed English teacher who prefers imagining sex – i.e.
masturbation – rather than having it; “You live out of your unconscious,”
she tells her more extrovert sister admiringly. Then, on her way to the ladies’
room in a bar, she sees a man and woman having sex – a device used in Living
Out Loud a few years ago, inspired in turn by Chekhov’s story “The Kiss”.
Then a woman is murdered, and a cop (Mark Ruffalo) comes calling, wearing the
same tattoo as the man in the bar. Are they the same man? Is the murdered woman
the same woman? Is Ruffalo the killer?
The film
comes on like a mystery, but in fact the mystery aspect is turgid and
undeveloped. What it’s really about is a woman’s fear – of sex, of the
world (which keeps her trapped, like those fences and railings), and of course
men. Ruffalo – with whom our heroine soon shacks up – is a fantasy ideal:
“I’ll be whatever you want me to be,” he tells her. “The only thing I
won’t do is beat you up”. Bit of a strange thing to say – but then
violence against women is a major motif here. Meg’s teenage students complain
that Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is boring because nothing
happens: “some old lady dies”. How many women have to die to make it good,
asks Meg? “At least three,” comes the reply.
In
The Cut does
indeed feature three dead women, but it still isn’t very good: there’s a
whiny defensive quality to its message, coming close to self-pity. Women
want babies, romance, the whole “courtship fantasy”; men are violent,
patriarchal, domineering. All they need from a woman are “a hole, tits and a
heartbeat,” joke the cops. Worse, women are drawn (on some level) to this kind
of violence; it’s when Ruffalo pretends to assault her that Meg finally agrees
to go to bed with him.
Some people wondered why an artist of Campion’s calibre should be drawn to this kind of material, based on a trashy bestseller. Doesn’t it pander to the worst kind of female masochism, spiced with the all-men-are-rapists rage that made Andrea Dworkin so briefly fashionable? (“What are you,” asks a hateful macho cop, “one a-them feminists?”)
In fact, Campion’s interest seems to have been mostly visual. The film looks amazing, photographed by Dion Beebe (who also shot Chicago): everything is blurry and shadowy, arranging things – especially in the early scenes – so large swathes of the image are slightly out of focus. Through the murk come blotches of bold primary colours, the sex scene spied by Meg staged as a play of blood-red on black.
The effect is to make everything uncertain and a little disorienting, turning this rather simplistic tale into an eloquent study of alienation, which has been Campion’s constant theme since her debut, Sweetie, in 1988; the fact that there’s now a political dimension to the alienation – i.e. that the heroine is Woman instead of just a woman – is incidental. Then again, it’s hard not to think about what the film is saying: sexually forward or liberated women wind up dead (the novel had Meg ending up dead as well, though that’s now been changed), men are violent beasts, and our heroine might’ve done better to go on living vicariously, through her poems and fantasies. There must be an easier way to be a woman and not die in the attempt.