I Would Like to See It: In the Cut

“The only thing I won’t do is beat you up,” says detective Giovanni Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) at the end of a spiel about the kind of boyfriend he could be to Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan). He says it like it’s a selling point, a rare feature one might shop around for, and in the supersaturated wet dream that is Jane Campion’s In the Cut, it’s not hard to believe it might well be just that. That we know there’s a good chance he brutally beats Black teenager Cornelius Webb (Sharrieff Pugh) — himself exploited and sexually toyed with by the much older Avery, his English teacher, toward whom he is later sexually and physically aggressive — for no real reason at all further complicates his paradoxical position as a source of danger and safety for Frannie. What keeps one particular white woman “safe” might just as easily maim or kill someone else, someone outside the circle of his sexual and romantic interest. And Malloy, too, is a victim of sexual violence and coercive control, raped at fifteen by a grown woman who happened to be bored and horny when he showed up at her door with a delivery.

Everyone, in both senses of the word, is hurting. Pain ebbs and flows through every scene. Malloy teaches Frannie how to shoot and for a split second as the blast of his service revolver echoes in the air she looks certain she’s its next target. Half-sisters Frannie and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) lie side by side in the sweltering heat of Manhattan in summer, fondly and then sourly sharing recollections of their father’s callous serial monogamy and its near-indistinguishability from storybook romance. The pink flush of their skin nearly leaps off the screen. In one scene a pair of delivery men pass behind Frannie on a subway platform with a towering heart-shaped wreath of roses, the red so deep and vivid it can only be taken for the color of blood. In another Frannie rides the subway past a strange tableau, a Black couple seemingly newly married and in full wedding attire, the bride black-eyed and in tears, the groom holding her veil. Before context can emerge the train screeches once more into motion.

A grisly serial killer plot unfolds with obscure inevitability, every image of crisis a kind of prophetic whisper, an intrusion of the film’s subtext into its text proper. For a long stretch in the film’s second and third acts it seems as though the killer could be any man we’ve met. Unstable stalker John Graham (Kevin Bacon). Malloy himself. The confused and angry young Webb with his belief that John Wayne Gacey was innocent and “desire” was the real culprit. A sexual game during which Frannie restrains Malloy with his own handcuffs turns suddenly tense as she considers not for the first time whether or not he himself might be the killer. In the end, after everything, she returns to him, lying down in the crook of his arm, but she makes no move to release him. We want violence to form a boundary around our lives, to hedge out undesirables and the nameless, faceless masses, but the price is inviting that same violence into our homes, our lives, and the most intimate orifices of our bodies.