Jane Campion is one of my favorite artists. So I went to see In The Cut.

It certainly is a brilliant step for Campion, can't say the same for Meg Ryan, but I had the same reaction to it as I did to Mystic River. The film works really well on one level, and pretty poorly on another.

It did elicit the longest film review I have written this year (even longer than Distant which had me yammering on ad nauseum). Even though Ryan pretty much ruins the film for Campion, there is a lot of great things going on. The character Ryan plays really is a counterpart to Holly Hunter's role in The Piano, so there are a lot of interesting comparisons to be made there in terms of feminism.

Wow. I'm off to read your review, but it's going to stand in stark contrast to every review I've read from a religious press source. (And you can guess what they're saying....)

When will your review be up, M?

Check tomorrow. Everything that could be said about the scenes in Mulholland Drive or Monsters Ball could be said about this film.

I found it way too artsy. I don't mind artsy, but this was a bit too much. One of the things that rubbed me wrong was the extensive overuse of red. Nearly every shot has at least a splash of red. Every traffic signal, including pedestrian signals, was red. Certainly red is a useful color. It can denote passion, violence, warning. But when you fill the film with red it can become a distraction (OK, when is the red coming into view - ah, there it is), or even worse, lose what meaning it's meant to convey.

As I scanned reviews, someone noted it was trying to be mainstream and art house fare without succeeding at either. I'd probably echo that. It's not that it couldn't make a good movie, it's just that it's too uncertain of what film it wants to be.

I came out of it the opposite way. But then again I am a big fan of Campion, Taymor, and other filmmakers that approach their films from the standpoint of visual setting.

Some of Campion's best stuff happens in this film. Her use of color itself is just as intense as it was in The Piano, only in a different direction. There are some spots in In The Cut that would work just as well in a gallery.

I was wondering why on earth I was seeing this film in a mainstream theater though. It certainly wasn't mainstream fare. I can imagine that if Hope Davis or someone like this had been cast instead of Meg Ryan, then this film would have been a major step for Campion with the art-house audience.

Yes, some off the shots are true art. There are pictures that do belong in a gallery. But I don't think some of them aid the storytelling. Not being well schooled in art, I can still recognize pictures from Picasso's blue period, but not always sure why he was so centered on blue. This is obviously Campion's red period, but I'm not sure why.

I also was a bit disappointed in the thriller aspect. There are at least 3 suspects for the serial killer with whom Frannie has some sort of close relationship with. Yet, she and the film mostly focus on Malloy.

[size=18]Spoiler alert (Had to get a splash of red in this post.)

Oh man, the storyline was sorely lacking. That was really unfortunate, there could have been a good story in there somewhere. I think that the value this film has is how we can compare it to The Piano and Campion's other stuff in terms of gender issues.

I'd be interested in your comparison of The Piano and In the Cut in terms of the feminist issues in each. I think both have a sense of women as victim (of societal mores in The Pianist, of sexual objectification in In the Cut). I do think your right in one of your earlier posts that Frannie is something of a counterpoint to the Ada in The Piano. One fights against the victimization and one participates in it.

I touch on some of that in my review.

Wonderful review.

Campion fan that you are, you might like to listen to her show from a couple weeks ago on The Treatment.

Darrel Manson wrote:
: I found it way too artsy. I don't mind artsy, but this was a bit too much.
: . . . As I scanned reviews, someone noted it was trying to be mainstream
: and art house fare without succeeding at either. I'd probably echo that.

Yeah, me too. The problem is not that it's "artsy", per se, but that it's "artsy" in service of such a generic -- and by that I mean genre-bound -- story.

I wish I could dig up that Ken Eisner review which says something about Jane Campion spending the past decade making bad movies out of good books, or something.