In the Cut (2003)

As befits such a  courageous woman director as Jane Campion, In The Cut moves star Meg Ryan out of the Rom Com fuzzies splat into the arena of toxic masculinity. That’s as drastic a persona remake as one can imagine. Unfortunately it sidelined rather than justly advanced Ryan’s persona.

Franny Avery (Ryan) is a college Creative Writing prof who moves through a world of poetry. Even beyond her classroom, her trips in the NYC subway provide snatches of poetry to beguile her. Her name suggests an ancestry in Salinger, with no Zooey here in sight to share her precocity and innocence. 

Her snatches of poety veer into the sensual and sensational. Thus one: “The still waters of the water under a frond of stars. The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses.” That last phrase anticipates her cunnilinguistic seduction by the aggressively sensitive cop Molloy (Mark Rufalo), a dab hand at articulating sexual techniques himself. Molloy persists in interviewing her about the first woman’s murder, the questioning segueing into courtship.

Instead of Zooey this Franny has a sadly hypersexual half-sister Pauline, whose aggressive luring of her doctor leads to her banishment and criminal charges. Pauline’s sadistic murder is the second one Franny confronts. The first victim's partial body was found in Franny’s garden. Eden this NYC tenement ain’t. This is underlined by the names of the working girls’ job sites: The Red Turtle, The Baby Doll. 

Franny and Pauline pretend to a sexual agency that proves an illusion. Both remain trapped in the oppression of male authority. The fat pimp outside Franny’s apartment may appear to be a caring guardian but he too sells women. 

In particular Franny’s poeticizing transparently fails to gloss over Pauline’s sexual helplessness: “You're a poet of love. The lovelorn man who Sick in soul and of this Busy human heart aweary Worships the spirit Of unconscious life In tree or wildflower Gentle lunatic.” That’s BS. Lorca but in this sad case a fatal BS.

Franny equally deceives herself in her intimate warming towards one of her students, the large seemingly sensitive black man Cornelius. He won’t carry her bag because that would be “an insult” to her Amazon bearing. She leaves it for him anyway. He obliges. Cornelius skips class, writes in defence of mass murderers and sadists like John Wayne Gacey and submits his assignments in blood-like red ink — or blood. When Franny admits a moment of intimate submission Cornelius shucks his professed gentleness altogether and proves as sexually violent as the literary subjects he professes to rewrite.   

    Franny at first denies any connection to the first woman’s murder. But she accidentally witnessed the victim’s earlier blowing a man with a telltale tattoo. Molloy’s reflections on that sexual act — plus having that telltale tattoo — eventually convince her that her lover is the killer. The ultimate revelation may clear him but it only confirms the official empowering of the rampant male at the expense and exploitation of women. That dooms women from the brilliant prof down to the most helpless and least tenurable.