Post by Capo on May 3, 2008 1:38:26 GMT
In the Cut
Jane Campion 2003 | Australia / USA / UK
A New York linguistics professor falls for the cop investigating a series of brutal murders in her neighbourhood; she also suspects him of the murders themselves.
Campion's disturbing film opens with a Mulholland Dr. feel to it - a dream-like shot of a pillow, and it develops thereafter much like a nightmare. It's best approached in this manner: as a police procedural, it's extremely whimsical (at one point we might be forgiven for forgetting the murders are even happening at all), and Campion's doing all sorts of recurring motifs and tricks to jar the diegesis - bringing music and ambience in and out at will, the unexplained, recurring shots of people running into alleys, and the the sudden change from day to night (and sunshine to torrential downpour) when Meg Ryan's character goes on her first date in the film: a symbolic, surreal gesture of entering uncomfortable territory.
Marketed as an erotic thriller in which Ryan was to subvert all expectations thitherto, it's more easily defined as a "body horror" (though it's very different to Cronenberg). It pushes, for instance, physicality to the core of its narrative: the limits of the body, the uniformity of the body, the vulnerabilities and possible pleasures of the body; characters exist and survive in this discomforting dystopia (an unrecognisable New York) by performative sexuality.
In this sense, the hideous, recurring murders are only a catalyst for Ryan's character to awaken from her intellectualised romanticism, and face her physicality (or womanhood) head-on - in order to do that, she must flirt with he who she (and we) suspect most to be the murderer himself. As this character - who is also the cop investigating the crimes - Mark Ruffalo is fantastic; unsettlingly self-assured and frank in his ways, he poses the most threat to Ryan's character because he is the one who threatens to bring her out of her contented self-repression. One might look at the film as a subversion of film noir, a genre normally and notably told through the male gaze; in this respect, Ruffalo becomes the homme fatale, so to speak, with Ryan's would-be femme fatale the subjective gaze through which we view the film. It's quite a convincing turn, too: imagine The Maltese Falcon told through Mary Astor, and Bogey's Sam Spade becomes a threatening figure of menace.
Jane Campion 2003 | Australia / USA / UK
A New York linguistics professor falls for the cop investigating a series of brutal murders in her neighbourhood; she also suspects him of the murders themselves.
Campion's disturbing film opens with a Mulholland Dr. feel to it - a dream-like shot of a pillow, and it develops thereafter much like a nightmare. It's best approached in this manner: as a police procedural, it's extremely whimsical (at one point we might be forgiven for forgetting the murders are even happening at all), and Campion's doing all sorts of recurring motifs and tricks to jar the diegesis - bringing music and ambience in and out at will, the unexplained, recurring shots of people running into alleys, and the the sudden change from day to night (and sunshine to torrential downpour) when Meg Ryan's character goes on her first date in the film: a symbolic, surreal gesture of entering uncomfortable territory.
Marketed as an erotic thriller in which Ryan was to subvert all expectations thitherto, it's more easily defined as a "body horror" (though it's very different to Cronenberg). It pushes, for instance, physicality to the core of its narrative: the limits of the body, the uniformity of the body, the vulnerabilities and possible pleasures of the body; characters exist and survive in this discomforting dystopia (an unrecognisable New York) by performative sexuality.
In this sense, the hideous, recurring murders are only a catalyst for Ryan's character to awaken from her intellectualised romanticism, and face her physicality (or womanhood) head-on - in order to do that, she must flirt with he who she (and we) suspect most to be the murderer himself. As this character - who is also the cop investigating the crimes - Mark Ruffalo is fantastic; unsettlingly self-assured and frank in his ways, he poses the most threat to Ryan's character because he is the one who threatens to bring her out of her contented self-repression. One might look at the film as a subversion of film noir, a genre normally and notably told through the male gaze; in this respect, Ruffalo becomes the homme fatale, so to speak, with Ryan's would-be femme fatale the subjective gaze through which we view the film. It's quite a convincing turn, too: imagine The Maltese Falcon told through Mary Astor, and Bogey's Sam Spade becomes a threatening figure of menace.