last night's double feature: in the cut and footsteps in the dark

In the Cut (2003. dir: Jane Campion) gets short shrift not for what it is, but for what it's not, which is Typical Meg Ryan Vehicle. Rather, it's a dark, somber, intelligent, and, above all, fearless film. Although directed by the astounding Campion, it might fit well into the ouevre of the less successful, less brilliant but still interesting Sally Potter. I've never given a Sally Potter film more than two stars on Netflix, but I always watch them once, and there are things from the Tango Lesson and Yes which stay strongly with me. In the Cut fits in as a darker third to these because it, too, is obsessed with telling truths (as opposed to spinning dreams) about feminine sexuality, using as its catalyst a smart, introspective woman's sexual fixation on a swarthy, ultra-macho guy. Meg Ryan, playing (possibly fatally to her career) against type, makes Franny into a fully credible portrait of a poet and teacher who has pulled away from the vicious traps of a love-life in the real world and replaced it with a rampant dream-life, only to be led back out of her temporary safety by the dark allure of a cop investigating a string of brutal murders, played by Mark Ruffalo with his usual courage and avoidance of bullshit.

Campion doesn't shrink from hard questions, or from showing us the terrible flaws cut and branded into the personalities of her two heroines, both the stronger, more self-contained Franny and her beloved half-sister, Pauline, played with all her vulnerability hanging out in that wonderful, vanity-less way by Jennifer Jason-Leigh. Both of these women are real, simultaneously damaged and strong in ways that women don't get to be in movies, not and remain the heroine. It's hard to watch sometimes, and certainly anyone looking for the dream-spinning which made Meg Ryan Movies into cash-cow-chick-flicks (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You Got Mail are all practically unwatchable in retrospect, movies stencilled from the thinnest sheet of cutesy and pasted together with spit and sugar-icing) is going to get sick to her stomach, never making it past the first third of the film.

A woman with a stronger palate, though, will find much substance as a reward for sticking with it. Even throwaway lines reveal ugly societal aspects of our commonplace attitudes towards sexuality in women. After handcuffed sex, the Ruffalo character (Malloy) tells her to find the key fast, he's "starting to feel like a chick." When Franny interrupts a string of faggot references to ask if all cops are homophobic, Malloy's partner asks in his most damning tone, "Are you one of those feminists?" I wish I could remember more; the script is packed with them.

Campion couldn't have cast any of the roles better. Both Nick Damici and Kevin Bacon are note-perfect, the former as Malloy's partner and the latter as a damaged one-night stand who cannot leave Franny alone and who totes around the sorriest-looking dog you'll ever see. There's a fantasy sequence that Campion uses to good effect, Franny's vision of the marriage-myth her mother used to live by: a story she told and re-told about the moment she met her future husband, and the manner in which he asked her to marry him. It's all distortion, and Franny knows it, but she still returns to it as you would to comfort food, even though she knows that her mother's life was ruined by the man. The insanity of longing for marriage and physical closeness with men even at the expense of happiness, health, and stability, a longing often installed like a central pillar in a woman's psyche from childhood, is examined in the most brutal, uncringing light, and the psychic punishments suffered by these women are mirrored in the dismemberments of the killer's victims, all given a diamond ring to wear before they are murdered.



Footsteps in the Dark (1941. dir: Lloyd Bacon) is a piece of cotton candy. Errol Flynn made it the same year he made his Custer film, and whereas he's the only reason to watch it, there are other, better ones to watch him in instead. It's a fluff-piece about a rich but happily-married dilletante who lives with his wife in her mother's mansion and enjoys a secret life as the author of scandalous mystery novels, and it's a role that someone other than Flynn really ought to have played. If Jimmy Stewart or William Powell assured us that he lied to his wife about his secret life because his love for her was so true and strong, we'd believe it. When Flynn says it, his innate rakishness makes a mockery of the words and implies something altogether seedier than the writing of mystery novels.

The joys of the film, slim as they are, lie in moments like watching his physical grace as he runs down a staircase, or his joie de vivre when he impersonates a Texan oil-tycoon in order to romance a murder suspect. Ralph Bellamy has a nice role as a babyfaced dentist, and Alan Hale, as always, shows up to play off Flynn in his light-hearted, avuncular way.