Sleepless in the Apple

For years, popular cinema has nurtured our need to escape from daily routine and to immerse ourselves in the grand flow of love and adventure. Movies cheerfully retell the dreams we ourselves produce--but in packaging that promises greater chances for glamour and success. As an inveterate consumer of these goods, I find myself a willing dupe to stories about the attractive rich whose days are spent in neither study nor work, but rather the heightened pursuit of romance. Nevertheless, whenever a film sneaks through the studio barricades and hoarsely whispers that these representations of love are false, that there is more to sexual attraction than laughter and champagne, I sometimes can't help but listen. Some of these films prove to be great--for example, Mike Figgis' The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Others, thrilled by their own self-ascribed realism, emerge as distasteful wrecks.

Jane Campion's In the Cut takes a maddening, even offensive, perspective on sexual desire. In the production notes, Campion states that her film "explores the contemporary mythology of love and sex and the effort at union with another person ... amidst all the chaos and energy of the modern city." "Misanthropically destroys" would have been more honest than "explores." In the Cut repeatedly equates sex with violence, men with danger, and women with vulnerability. Its central image is of a shadowy, predatory male receiving fellatio from a submissive, kneeling, faceless girl. How is this image, which has been dredged from the recesses of some Paleolithic unconscious, supposed to resonate with us? Far too frequently, the camera and the lighting conspire to make every man a potential aggressor and every woman an objectified target.

The film opens with a rendezvous between Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan), a Creative Writing instructor in Manhattan, and her student Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh). They meet in a dimly-lit bar where Cornelius, broadly characterized as macho and black, lords on about his "Africa-vision," his "bitch-vision" and his obsession with convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy. In this scene, Campion conveys Frannie's urban exhaustion through a disoriented visual style, sometimes concentrating on an object in the extreme foreground while key movement occurs in the background, or freely shifting her camera's focus with each new sight or sound.

Sexuality undergoes equally banal symbolization. In class, Frannie lectures her students on Virginia Woolf. She stands in front of a blackboard on which she has drawn a lighthouse that uncannily resembles a large, red, ejaculating penis. A student complains that nothing happens in To the Lighthouse except a woman's death. "How many ladies have to die to make it good?" Frannie asks. "At least three!" he roars in reply. A better film would have explored the themes in To the Lighthouse, rather than dropping the subject once the allusion to the number of victims to be expected had been accomplished.

The first murder brings Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) to Frannie's door, and the screenplay burdens him with dialogue both crudely and obliquely sexual. Upon entering Frannie's apartment, she asks him to stop smoking. He pauses, running his eyes over her body. Then, fingering his cigarette, he asks, "You got some place for me to put it out?" This scene sadly captures the film's most advanced view of male-female (sexual) relations. Malloy invites Frannie out for drinks and he is soon advising her on "how to flirt with black girls ... you stare back at them" or complaining that, when giving fellatio, most women have "no sense of cock."

As in her adaptation of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, Campion seems to regard feminine desire as deeply masochistic and adult women as victims of male lust. Men fare no better. Kevin Bacon plays John, Frannie's ex-boyfriend, who now stalks her every move. The film extends him a rare moment of sympathy when he describes the bitter loneliness of working the sixteen-hour shifts of a medical resident. Our identification with him is brief and he soon sinks back into caricature, screaming "Fuck!" and asking, "Did I ever tell you my mother use to dress me in girls' blouses?" "Oh, he's so intense," Frannie sighs afterward.

In the Cut suffers from the inhumanity and narrowness of its basic conceit. In this world, love may not be all happiness and pleasure, but neither is it, as the film suggests, paranoia and violence. In the end, Campion sacrifices her characters to this unhealthy thesis. Though Ruffalo's detective hypnotically displays how cruelty can underlie the giving of sexual pleasure, this should not be the only connection we immediately make.