In Jane Campion's films, women are stunted communicators. They are overwhelmed by larger-than-life men in the presence of whom their words are clearly futile, not to be uttered. In In the Cut the protagonist Frannie is an English professor who collects the words of others but does not have much to say on her own account. She is silenced inside by a bewildered fear of people-men-which she carries around in the form of a great vulnerability. As we see her in the streets of New York, in the bars, on the train, in her house, we are struck by how small and fragile she looks, a beautiful thing in a very rough world. Frannie is constantly pondering over the little poems, or fragments of poems, the transit authority posts in the New York subway trains. She is also writing a book on slang words, which she gathers by regularly meeting a black student in a seedy restaurant-bar. The words are very much not her own words, part of a culture she studies as an outsider. In her home, she meticulously posts words and sentences on cork boards on the walls. When the cop who will become her lover first enters her place, the first thing he notices are the words. When he leaves, he leaves behind a new word, `disarticulated,' which Frannie hastens to scribble down and put up with the others.
Disarticulated, or inarticulate, is, in fact, what Frannie is. She cannot articulate her unease, and stumbles through a traumatized post-9/11 New York in a state of shell-shocked withdrawal. Along with her unease, she cannot articulate her desire. Pauline, her sister, who knows her well, pressures her into dating men, presumably because she doesn't. Pauline herself, who lives surrounded by sex because her apartment is literally above a go-go bar and she's close to the girls, is in love with a doctor who sleeps with her but does not love her back and whom she sees mainly by making doctor's appointments. Frannie's and Pauline's lives are filled with desire and sensuality. Their houses are steeped in color and sound, wonderfully cozy houses, not expensive but lusciously decorated with red shag carpets and piles of soft cushions. At the beginning of the film, Frannie's and Pauline's desire shows itself in their love for each other. Since we don't know the two are sisters (half-sisters, actually), we think Pauline is Frannie's lover. The two women touch a lot, walk holding hands, part with a loud kiss on the mouth. The play of their hands, their touch, their physical proximity dominates all the scenes in which they appear together in the film. In the meantime, the doctor Pauline is in love with is seeking a restraining order against her. The idea that she may be issued a restraining order feels absurd to Pauline, who tells Frannie the story in grief and disbelief. Looking at Frannie and Pauline huddled up in Pauline's apartment, it feels absurd to us, too: theirs is clearly a world in which women have a lot more to fear from men than men from women.
Men are portrayed from the start and consistently as dangerous predators. The student Frannie meets in the bar is cocky and macho, and Frannie looks remarkably vulnerable sitting with him with her professorial glasses on. In the back of the room, women giggle with a guy or two. When Frannie goes to the restroom, she gets lost in the back of the bar and comes across a woman giving a man a blow job. The scene is, again, filled with menace. At the same time, Frannie is attracted to it, and look on, unseen. When she comes back to her table her student is gone, sent away by a mixture of impatience and jealousy.
These threatening men (besides the student, who will later try to rape Frannie, there's Frannie ex-boyfriend, who breaks into her house, and of course the cop and his partner) serve the purpose of the film, which, as a slasher thriller, means to keep us guessing which one of the guys is the serial murderer who strangles women, rips their throats open, and cuts them to pieces. Juxtaposed to Frannie's desire, though, this pervasive sense of male threat functions at a deeper level, because it provides a context to her inwardness and isolation. When Frannie finally gets her detective into bed, Campion does a great job of making the intensely erotic and explicit lovemaking all about Frannie and her pleasure. Molloy's own pleasure is not even addressed. The sex is all about Frannie and her delight. In his review of the film, Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald describes the sex in the film as cold. I am not surprised, though I think he is dead wrong. The film's exceptional eroticism may fail to register, or register fully, on the American viewer's radar screen because its polarities are subverted. I never thought of this before seeing this scene, but in fact movie sex scenes (the heterosexual ones) are all about the man's conquest of the woman. The man fucks the woman. In In the Cut, Frannie fucks the detective, not in the sense that he is passive (he isn't), but in the sense that the whole scene is about her pleasure, her desire. So the typical parameters along which we are trained to register eroticism on the screen do not work here, because there is no sense of male conquest, no taking over of the female body. The female body is possessed only of its own pleasure, a pleasure Molloy serves. The camera is focused on Frannie's face, on her gestures and expression of sexual delight-and these are conveyed rather restrainedly in terms of movie conventions, without moans or grunts and little verbal ejaculations. Frannie moans only when she gives herself an orgasm, not when Molloy gives it to her. Also, and significantly, Frannie is the one who initiates the lovemaking, in a matter-of-fact, unromantic way that is atypical of this kind of movies. So it requires a different mindset to appreciate the eroticism of In the Cut, a mindset focused on the pleasure of women rather than on the pleasure of men.
Besides wanting to hurt women, men want to own them. This theme runs through the film as a constant thread. Pauline's and Frannie's father, whom we see in sepia-colored sequences ice skating with the woman who's destined to be Frannie's mother, fell in love with her on a frozen pond while he was already engaged to another woman. The woman, disgusted by her fiancee's behavior, threw her engagement ring on the ice. The man picked it up and, half an hour later, put it on the hand of his new conquest. The sepia-colored sequences return two or three times. Just to make sure that we get it, Campion has the ice-skating father run over his new fiancee, cutting her to pieces with the sharp blades of her skates. The men who want to own women are the same men who will cut them to pieces. Molloy also asks Frannie to get engaged to him, as will the serial killer before she kills him and ends the movie. So Frannie is constantly fighting: to protect herself from male violence and to retain her independence. When, towards the end, Molloy, apparently frustrated by Frannie's silences and withdrawal, shouts at her that she's exhausting him, she locks him to a drain-pipe with his handcuffs and fucks him. The sex, as before, is about her, not his pleasure.
Frannie doesn't win her battle. The ravaged city of New York is too far gone, too lost in violence and horror, for a small woman like her to right things. But, as in her other films, Campion shows us a woman who reappropriates her desire without emasculating her partner or turning away from men altogether. This is a great victory unto itself.
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