Hot and cold

Jane CAMPION’S astonishingly beautiful new film, “In the Cut,” may be the most maddening and imperfect great movie of the year. Certainly it’s the most difficult to cozy up to with its unnerving fusion of hot sex, icy sentiment and warm-running blood. The movie is being pitched as an erotic thriller, but despite a suspense subplot and the frisson that comes with watching professional cupcake Meg Ryan do the nasty, it plays far closer to an adults-only fairy tale -- albeit one in which the happily-ever looks a lot like “Taxi Driver.”

Think of it as the ultimate grim fairy tale: the story of a woman who, while wandering the streets of New York and the tangled wilds of her imagination meets not one but several big bad wolves. Hovering around age 40, Frannie (Ryan), a writing teacher and amateur linguist, lives alone in an apartment ornamented with words fixed to the walls. She’s doing a study of contemporary slang and sometimes taps one of her students, Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), for the latest in street patois. She evinces a particular interest in sexual and violent colloquialisms, and indeed the film’s title, which is taken from Susanna Moore’s controversial 1995 novel, turns out to be an especially vulgar descriptor for intercourse.

Cornelius is one wolf on the prowl; a homicide detective named Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) is another. Malloy comes knocking on Frannie’s door after an amputated female hand turns up in the teacher’s back yard. A serial killer seems to be running amok in the city, chopping women into mincemeat. Neither surprised nor visibly disturbed by this grisly news (you’d think body parts littered her front door), Frannie agrees to meet Malloy for drinks. But put off by his boorish, epithet-spewing partner, Rodriguez (Nick Damici), she flees the date and runs straight into the arms of a would-be mugger. Eluding her attacker gives her an excuse to contact Malloy, ostensibly for some protective pointers. The detective plays along with this fantasy by roughly putting an arm around Frannie’s neck and whispering dirty nothings in her ear.

Has Little Red Riding Hood jumped in bed with the wolf? That question drives “In the Cut,” giving it a hum of nervous tension, but like all of Campion’s features this is a movie that earns its thrills from two people circling each other and casual camera movements that catch moments of startling beauty. The film is filled with surreal, hothouse flourishes that tell the story as vividly and often more eloquently than either the plot mechanics or dialogue. In one scene, Frannie distractedly watches two women playing pool, one in a red dress, the other in green, a visual warning that she doesn’t pick up on. Later, after telling the macabre story of her mother and father’s courtship, she stands next to a blood-red wreath of flowers adorned with a banner reading “Mom.”

At once dreamy and watchful, Frannie has the wounded mien of someone who’s endured too many breakups. There’s something disappointed about her but something angry, too. When Frannie and her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), lounge around listening to love songs, the explicitness of their desire comes as a shock because it’s so nakedly hurting. “What you need is a baby,” Pauline coos, “and a man,” echoing the words that reverberate through many women’s heads whether they want them to or not. What Frannie really needs is something else, but when she first meets Malloy she looks at him as if he’s stinking up the room. For his part, Ruffalo lets us know the cop doesn’t care. “Tell me what you want me to be,” Malloy tells Frannie, tracing tattoos of longing on her body.

Steeped in sexual paranoia and violence, Moore’s novel is a chilly, self-conscious exercise in genre. It’s a cheap shot of a book, but Campion has always enjoyed exploring the darker side of sex and power, so it’s easy to see what attracted her to Frannie’s strange adventure. The director handles the cop stuff effortlessly, nailing the hard precinct vibe and combative banter between Malloy and his partner, but she never satisfyingly integrates the story’s thriller elements with the florid drama inside Frannie’s noggin. The film mainly unfolds from Frannie’s perspective and the images are often blurred around the edges to show just how little of the world she sees. But unlike the wife in Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” the classic paranoid-woman movie, Frannie is also right to be scared.

Campion’s visual language is richer, more expressive than Moore’s prose, and in adapting the book she’s appreciably warmed up the novel’s characters, in particular Pauline, who looks as lush as overripe fruit and just as easy to bruise. Malloy gives off waves of heat, while Frannie’s former lover, wittily played by Kevin Bacon, provides some humorous relief. But because Campion, unlike Moore’s book, is fundamentally hopeful about men and women, there’s something cockeyed about how the film ties up its loose genre threads. It’s nice to see Ryan play a role without the usual ingratiation (there’s always been a sour grimace lurking beneath that smile), but despite her best efforts it’s difficult to accept where Frannie lands. Most of the film’s last 30 minutes veer between the baffling and numbing, but just when you’re ready to throw in the towel, Campion delivers a final grace note.

Although Campion isn’t as strongly committed to surrealism as David Lynch, the final image of a slowly closing door in this film affirms that she’s never been entirely in the grip of realism. A fever dream and a pitch-dark romance, “In the Cut” takes place as much in the realm of myth as on the downtown streets of New York; in each, women are either the heroines of their own stories or its victims. If nothing else, the film takes it on faith that the old storybook routines no longer apply, which helps explain why “Taxi Driver” -- with its frenzied masculine violence and febrile vision of the city as a landscape of fear and desire -- hangs over this movie so heavily. Once upon a time, Travis Bickle saved the girl, but then she grew up. Who saves her now?

*

‘In the Cut’

MPAA rating: R, for strong sexuality including explicit dialogue, nudity, graphic crime scenes, language

Times guidelines: Nudity, explicit sexual encounters, adult language, gory violence

Meg Ryan...Frannie

Mark Ruffalo...Malloy

Jennifer Jason Leigh...Pauline

Nick Damici...Rodriguez

Sharrieff Pugh...Cornelius

Screen Gems and Pathe Productions LTD present a Laurie Parker production, released by Screen Gems. Director Jane Campion. Writers Jane Campion, Susanna Moore. Based on the novel by Susanna Moore. Producers Laurie Parker, Nicole Kidman. Director of photography Dion Beebe. Production designer David Brisbin. Editor Alexandre de Franceschi. Costume designer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor. Music supervisor Laurie Parker. Music Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson. Casting Billy Hopkins, Suzanne Smith, Kerry Barden, Mark Bennett. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

Exclusively at Pacific’s The Grove, 189 The Grove Drive, L.A. (323) 692-0829; AMC Century 14, 10250 S. Santa Monica Blvd. (310) 289-4262; AMC Santa Monica 7, 1310 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica (310) 289-4262.