Taking fantasy too far

You have to take your hat off to Jane Campion: she is a bold director. She has an outrageous passion for sex as mystery, sex without regard for believable motivation or plot, sex as something secret, something separate from our daily lives. She feels her own fantasy so keenly that she has made three very particular films to explore it: films in which the leading men show their feelings with stoical, tender gestures while the women look on, impassive for the most part, and then suddenly not. But always in control.

Remember The Piano, with a sombre Holly Hunter playing scales for a naked, emotional Harvey Keitel. In Holy Smoke, a manipulative Kate Winslet strips for Keitel (and he was emotional all over again, although this time in lipstick and a red dress), daring him to dive into the challenge. And you feel that Campion wanted to make In The Cut, a sexually explicit thriller, for the few scenes in which a complicated Meg Ryan gets her hands on the appealing Mark Ruffalo, her lollipop prize with a pimp moustache.

Ryan plays Frannie, a teacher who holds classes in modern English literature at a school for brilliant delinquents. She doesn't take any crap - but then who would want to cross such an unsmiling woman? She stands with her brown hair cut to hide a delicate neck, her arms weighed down with leather satchels, mistrust on her face like a shadow.

But men want and want her: a former lover (Kevin Bacon, twitchy and funny) paces the streets outside her apartment, and a student arranges to meet her in a bar, where he sits and gazes and tries to talk dirty. Then one evening, police detective Malloy (Ruffalo) drops round to ask if she had heard anything unusual on the night someone was murdered in her back garden. Frannie is unhelpful, tense, like someone put in a physically close situation that she isn't accustomed to, yet Malloy falls for her hook, line and sinker.

The scene goes like this: our heroine slumps in a jumper, scribbling down quotes from Pablo Neruda poems ("I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees"), when Ruffalo's Italian-Irish cop invites himself in and leans against her kitchen units, pockets full of handcuffs, mouth full of kind advice, eyes popping with longing. They become lovers.

Malloy, naturally, is a wizard in bed. He puts Fran's pleasure first then smokes cigarettes into the night, telling stories about how, long ago, a Latino neighbour showed him how to brave the clitoris. For the next few days, she is a grinning mess - the perfect cue for Ryan's Cheshire-cat smile. She visits her sister Pauline, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who acts so whackedout you wonder if she mixed mogadon with vodka to get through the film. Still, she musters the energy to persuade Frannie to ask Malloy for a second date. But he is busy: he has murders to investigate. For reasons that feel foolish on screen and would seem even more unlikely on a page, she suspects that he might be a serial killer.

This all happens in a fanciful New York, a city of wind chimes and magic and danger. It looks like the NYC of Shaft (filthy, a place to die in) crossed with the one in Eyes Wide Shut (where colours pulse and mingle, and every dark room hides an illicit sexual encounter).

We are clearly inside Campion's head. The film has been adapted from Susanna Moore's hit novel of the same name, but the mythic tone, the sensual tastes, are pure Campion. Watching In The Cut, with its kisses and power struggles and staring eyes filled with tears of desire and confusion, is too much like reading Campion's dream notebook: some passages are overdone, sickly, afraid of reality, while others are wet-lipped and truly compelling. You want to read on, but feel it's inappropriate to do so. Like eavesdropping on a phone call.

In The Cut
Cert: cert18