Back in 2017, I wrote a peice for Curzon Film Blog about Jane Campion's films and the Female gaze. Through each of Campion’s films, the characters are exposed at some point in the stories and experience moments of pure pleasure, even in the more innocent of love stories. They show that women can feel these emotions and that it is perfectly normal for women to discover and live out their fantasies. They aren’t glamourised or suffer the notorious ‘male gaze’, the characters and films are an erotic exploration of the female soul. This is what makes Campion such a unique and championing filmmaker.
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Although perceived by some as a film that yielded to the typical genre tropes, In The Cut can also be viewed as challenging film noir’s exploration of female sexuality. Frannie (Meg Ryan), a high school English teacher who collects memorable quotes, pretty phrases and dark words, finds herself embroiled in a dark and seedy world of crime after a young woman is brutally murdered.
Frannie goes through a period of self-discovery and erotic encounters with a police officer working the case. This break from her ‘normal’ shakes her to her core, but despite the danger she knows she is walking into, she is drawn like a moth to a flame into this new world. Frannie is seen as an object of desire by one of her students and then by Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) who is taken with her after a couple of meetings; but unlike the femme fatale character in most film noir stories, Frannie is not so easily swayed, she isn’t led by her need for men but instead her want for sexual contact. Ultimately it is her curiosity that leads her down a dark path, but Campion makes Frannie her own hero and even has her draw blood to save herself.
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This is an exact from a post first posted as in 2017