Ray Pride

Of all the scary places not to go, walking into a room with "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" on the TV is one of my least favorite.

Foolish comparisons have been made between Richard Brooks' shrill, 1977 anti-sex screed and Jane Campion's haunted, weary "In the Cut." Yet each filmmaker's reacting to their own fears; Brooks, 65 and estranged from the world of women in their twenties when his movie was released, Campion, 49, wondering about her own generation's dealings with love.

Drawn from Susanna Moore's 1995 novel, Campion says her film is about "the death of romance," not so much a thriller as a raw, tactile consideration of the mystery and suspense of touch and want. Downtown Manhattan, now: Frannie (Meg Ryan) teaches creative writing, collects words, seems mostly in a daze. A young woman is murdered, severed head left in Fannie's petal-strewn garden. When Fannie meets Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), the homicide detective investigating the case, something sparks, and their sexual bond grows as killings continue.

After seeing it twice, I can't agree with reviews that have dismissed "In the Cut" as grandiloquent Guignol, a failure more horrific than terrifying. Campion's movie is luxuriantly visual, mostly in a ruby-and-amber haze, warm yet cloacal. Cinematographer Dion Beebe's camera jitters and steals looks at passing figures. Some have called "Cut" pretentious, for its simmering mood, for its occasional blunt symbolism, for Frannie's alienation, for her relationship with her half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who lives above a strip club and has her own pronounced case of erotomania, obsessing on a therapist who made the bad choice of sleeping with her once, then "firing" her as a client. They both bear mostly unspoken, even unspeakable emotional damage. It's loneliness, an urban isolation. "This is what I do to get a dick inside of me," Pauline says, with characteristic Leigh wooziness. In film and novel, Pauline reflects, "I can remember every guy I ever fucked by the way he wanted to do it, not how I wanted." That moment, like many, is about Ryan's face. Fannie's given up, something in her face, her eyes, has gone slack, as she tolerates the worst of modern men in the city and their immodest shortcomings.

Almost all the dialogue in the script (co-written by the novelist) is drawn from the book, but the playful, literary voice affected by Moore is gone, replaced instead of Ryan's shell-shocked weariness. Fannie seems the saddest soul even in an extended masturbation scene, where she strains at the limits of her body, her twerpy play at flexing, extending her bare feet. It's an orgasmic reach repeated once she and Malloy are in bed, a scene between Ruffalo and Ryan played out in extended takes, with near-explicit forms of foreplay I can't remember in an American movie. (Some might find the site of Malloy's licking ticklish or even inappropriate.)

Even with cuts mandated for an "R" rating, there's an everyday groping and striving to much of their encounters. Asking her at the Toronto Film Festival about how involved her directions are in such scenes, the first of many self-effacing Campion giggles surfaces. "Well, I'm the director, you see, I have to sculpt it!" She pauses. "It's very graphic and particular in its instructions, even in the novel, so you just follow the manual. Very easy, really."

What I found most harrowing was how palpable Frannie's disenchantment is in Ryan's performance, capturing how women who are in their late thirties or early forties stop believing in romance. "Yeah, yeah, I think that's the serious heart of the film."

It's dispiriting, I say, when Fannie's listening to the nonsense of an actor-turned-doctor (Kevin Bacon) who's sort of stalking her after they've been together only twice. "I think what's hard about us in Western culture, men and women, is the unexamined power of the romantic myth, what we demand or want from partners and from our love life and our romances that just can't deliver. It simply doesn't and can't. I think it has everybody looking in the wrong way and spending their lives endlessly-especially women, if they don't feel they have a partner or they're not loved, that this means in some way that their life's not real or not whole."

That something's missing? "That there's a dark abyss in it. Somehow their meaning is removed from them if they're not seen as lovable in the world or loved by a man. Also, by that age, it's not the first romance. [Women] have become professional at it, almost like war veterans. They finally become damaged. In their heart, like Pauline knows, she probably can't do it, won't do it. But she looks at her sister and thinks Fannie is OK, she's healthy enough, she could get there." Campion laughs, considers the appropriateness of her words. "I would actually use the metaphor of Vietnam veterans," she says confidently, saying she found that between the lines of Moore's story. "People that have just seen too much and are wounded by it. Their experiences are too upsetting."

"In the Cut" opens Friday.

(2003-10-29)

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