The men in Jane Campion’s films and TV shows often know how to fuck, and they know how to hurt, and the space between those extremes isn’t very wide. These are rough and tumble men—sailors and foresters, drug dealers who survived Thai prison time, homicide detectives—and the way they look would imply certain things about them. Brutish, maybe, and used to command, certainly. Violent, perhaps, and defensive, probably. But what Campion has always done is complicate our assumptions about toxic masculinity by incorporating vulnerability, and peeling back the layers of so much macho artifice to reveal the rawness and tenderness beneath.
Campion’s latest, “The Power of the Dog,” recently released on Netflix, traffics in themes about the complicated relationship between brawny manliness and sexual desire that are similar to what the filmmaker has been putting forth for decades. The weight of Baines’ (Harvey Keitel) gaze upon Ada (Holly Hunter) as she performs in “The Piano,” and how that open want leads to the horizontal line of their nude bodies embracing. Thomas M. Wright’s Johnno taking off his clothes and swearing to his high school sweetheart and maybe-sister Robin (Elisabeth Moss) that he’s going to love her forever, and prove it by killing the men who raped her, in the first (superior) season of “Top of the Lake.” And in Campion’s “In the Cut,” her most transparently—and exhilaratingly—sensual thriller, Mark Ruffalo’s Detective Giovanni Malloy couldn’t be more sexually forthright if he tried. He wants Meg Ryan’s Frannie Avery, and he sees no point in pretending otherwise. He caresses her and touches her, his mustache gets a damp workout, he drops his voice an octave lower when launching into phone sex. No preamble, but a request for permission, and then he’s off to turn her on.
Does it matter that Malloy might not be a good person—in fact, that he might be a very bad person? Does it matter that he laughs at the fact that his partner, Detective Richard Rodriguez (Nick Damici), is constantly cheating on his wife and making broadly generalized, vaguely racist statements about the women with whom he’s adultering? Does it matter that he aims a wary eye at the Black high school student with whom Frannie has a somewhat-inappropriate flirtation, or that he laughs at certain slurs? Sure. All of it matters. A person is the totality of their actions, their judgments, and their choices, and we’re all flawed. But what Campion asks us to do with Malloy is consider the singularity of this man, and the honesty with which he approaches this woman Frannie, and the possibility that physical attraction might be the most real thing people can offer each other. A man might not be able to save you, Campion’s films tend to tell their female protagonists, but if he can do right by you, and do you right? That might be the best-case scenario, and “In the Cut” remains a particular standout in Campion’s filmography for the allure of that assessment.
“The only thing I won’t do is beat you up.”
Is it gender essentialist to say that the primary thing women fear is men? Maybe, although the statistics about domestic partner violence in the United States are undoubtedly bleak, and comparatively, women account for only 11% of serial murders in the past century vs. 89% from men, who often stalk their (also often) female victims. Not all men, of course, but the patriarchy is widespread enough, and the misogyny it spawns is pervasive enough, that being a woman means exercising an array of learned behaviors, passed-down warnings, and protective measures just to make it through the day.
Frannie Avery (Ryan), a high school English teacher living alone in New York City, is fully aware of the myriad demands of men upon her time, her attention, and her body. From her student Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), who smirkingly waits for Frannie’s reaction to an idea about an essay in which he absolves John Wayne Gacy of his many murders, sexual assaults, and other crimes. From the obsessive John Graham (Kevin Bacon), with whom Frannie slept twice and who has since refused to leave her alone—watching, following, and stalking her. From the strangers who catcall her on the street, or the fellow patrons at the bar who eye her up. All of them want to claim some part of her, and Campion is purposefully opaque about how much Frannie wants to be claimed. Campion’s recurring use of search focus, hazy lighting, and sliced-apart compositions in which parts of the frame are hidden or blocked add to the overall disconcerting effect. Ryan is often nonplussed, her affect one of resigned politeness or light indifference. “Que Será, Será” plays over the film’s opening credits, and “Whatever will be, will be” sounds like someone accepting that the price for womanhood is tied to the number of minutes one is forced to spend with men.
All of that changes, though, with the introduction of Ruffalo’s Malloy. In Cecil B. DeMille’s forever-classic 1956 version of “The Ten Commandments,” a group of shepherding sisters marvel at their first glimpse of Moses after he springs into action to defend the women and their flock. “He’s a man!” they coo, and that statement comes less from Charlton Heston’s physical brawn and more so from how fully he commits to serving these women, tending to their needs, and honoring them as individuals. He pays attention to them instead of waiting for them to pay attention to him, and that deliberate switch is what Campion does with Malloy in “In the Cut,” too.
Ruffalo is viscerally hot here, and it would be a lie to pretend that how he looks doesn’t have a lot to do with that. All the early ‘90s signifiers for a bad boy are offered to us on his body: lean muscle, a full spread of chest hair, stick and poke-looking tattoos of a scorpion on his arm and a spade on his wrist, the aforementioned mustache. If the goal were to make Malloy look as close to the porn version of a homicide detective as possible, then “In the Cut” succeeded. But Ruffalo takes it a step further by imbuing his performance with a darkly commanding edge, a laser-sharp focus, and just enough bashfulness to make sure Malloy comes off as a believable human being. Unlike the other men in Frannie’s life, Malloy doesn’t take from her. Instead, he gives, and his willingness to do so is what makes “In the Cut” so carnally ripe and so engrossing to watch.
Consider Ruffalo’s delivery of Malloy’s refreshingly direct come-on to Frannie. This is the kind of forwardness that earns flushes and blushes, and the power of Ruffalo’s performance is in the quiet confidence—almost a casualness—that he adopts for this offering of himself. “I can be whatever you want me to be. You want me to romance you, take you to a classy restaurant? No problem. You want me to be your best friend and fuck you? Treat you good, lick your pussy? No problem. Ain’t much I haven’t done. The only thing I won’t do is beat you up,” and let me quote those shepherdesses when I say he is a man. Ruffalo, softly lit in this scene in a way that adds a warm glow to his features, doesn’t pause, and he doesn’t stumble. He knows what other men could do to Frannie, and he doesn’t want to be like them. He will change himself not to impress her but to fulfill her, and that adaptability is a sort of subversion. He maintains eye contact with Ryan’s immediately aroused Frannie, and Campion makes sure to show us his grazing touch on the inside of her thigh. Whew, and lordt, and hot damn, you know? Malloy may be a fuckboy who jokes about not knowing what condoms are, but that mouth! Those fingers! Frannie goes weak, and so do I!
Earlier in the film, Frannie had overseen a man receiving oral sex from a woman in the shadowy basement of a bar and lingered to watch. Close-ups focused on how that woman’s hands stroked the man’s thighs, and how his hand held her head in place. But where that scene had the tone of forced servitude, the later moment between Frannie and Malloy is charged with promise, set on equal footing, and defined by the female gaze’s emphasis on one’s physical form as an extension of their emotional selves. The contrast between Malloy’s glancing stroke and the steady, measured quality of his offer is emblematic of the character overall: A man for whom sex is a partnership, a gift, and a challenge, and who delivers what he promises, carnal and vulgar and filthy as it may be.
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees,” Frannie reads from the Pablo Neruda poem “Every Day You Play,” and “In the Cut” evokes the explosion of those blooms—which are what trees use to reproduce—in the sex scenes to come. More than once, “In the Cut” ties pain and pleasure together. In Frannie’s apartment on their first night together, with Malloy taking control: an arm around her neck, her underwear stripped from her body, his mouth lowering down to her backside, his fingers working their way beneath the blanket covering her bottom half. Frannie wonders “how you did that to me,” and Malloy’s answer is a frank admission that he was taught by an older woman, and taught well. Whenever he’s with Frannie, he can’t stop himself—but metaphorically, not literally—and the timbre in his voice when he suggests to her, “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” is an infectious thing.
If our identities are tied up only with our physicality, then Malloy’s tiptoeing toward smugness would equal an overall arrogance. But what Campion achieves in “In the Cut,” as she does in her other cinematic presentations of how a man and woman might fall for each other, is undercut our notions about gendered behavior and instead locate the humanity under all that sweat and all that stickiness. “Would you get engaged to me?” Malloy gently asks after one of their trysts, a question so absurd in its too-soonness that Frannie eventually scoffs back, “Do you ever tell the truth?” Contrast that, though, with Bacon’s John demanding of women on the street, “Will you have sex with me?” and the presumptiveness of his breaking into Frannie’s apartment to lay down in her bed half-naked, or the way Cornelius practically pushes himself into Frannie’s apartment and threatens her after she refuses sex. Malloy is a dangerous man, with a gun and a badge, but he takes Frannie home. He bathes her. He asks her what she wants. He might not be able to give it to her, but he cares enough to know. And when he rasps out during the film’s final sex scene, as Frannie writhes on top and chases her orgasm, that “I like it in the cut,” it’s sexual slang, of course. But understood another way, it’s about Malloy’s willingness to indulge in the hurt, in the dark, and in the primal, and his devotion to doing so as long as Frannie is with him. It’s tawdry and romantic both, and that duality retains “In the Cut” as one of Campion’s best.
“In the Cut” and “The Power of the Dog” are both streaming on Netflix.