IN THE CUT

It is possible for a good filmmaker to go right off the tracks, and that's what happens in IN THE CUT. Director Jane Campion demonstrates a lot of visual skill and gets very good work from her actors, especially leading lady Meg Ryan (playing much against type here), but the storytelling and emphasis are so astonishingly out of tune that even the overall professionalism can't save the proceedings.

Ryan plays Frannie

IN THE CUT.

© Screen Gems

It's hard to know where to begin to talk about what's wrong with IN THE CUT, but a big part of the problem is that the director Campion and her co-writer Susanna Moore, working from Moore's novel, try to make sex appear both naturalistic and as unsafe as taking a dip in the ocean in JAWS. While it's true that a lot of people approach sex with new partners with understandable trepidation, the movie makes it all seem so ominous that it sails right past anything approaching valid social commentary or even eroticism to simply seem paranoid and silly, the more so because the filmmakers appear to want to say something profound about the way men and women interact.

The thriller aspect is even more off-key, with secrets kept, observations unmentioned and one obvious question unasked (because the answer would bring the film to a screeching halt), so that several main characters wind up looking like utter morons.

IN THE CUT appears to be trying to mine the same vein of sexual paranoia that LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR did decades ago, but a) the latter film was based on an actual incident, b) times have changed and c) even GOODBAR acknowledged that not all sexual interactions have to seem like life-threatening incidents. Oddly enough, in a glossier, more superficially-intended film, it might be possible to skate past some of the plot holes, but the earnestness of the tone here means we have to take everything seriously.

IN THE CUT invites us to solemnly ponder the following: Is Frannie so disillusioned by past experience that sex must be dangerous for her? Is she deliberately overlooking those things that the audience notices? What of Malloy, her troubled, enigmatic lover? It's all meant to be sexually and intellectually provocative, but the results are unpersuasive, pretentious and, worst of all, dull.