She’s happily unruly

Jane CAMPION twirls a pigtail and laughs. The director of such genre- and gender-bending movies as “The Piano” and “Holy Smoke” is talking about the time she, her friend Nicole Kidman and producer Laurie Parker thought that they could rule the world or, at least, America with a project they wanted to develop called “In the Cut.”

“Us girls -- Laurie, Nic and myself -- had this fabulous idea,” Campion says. “We were trying to be like moguls. We thought that we would finance the entire film out of foreign pre-sales and that we would keep USA for ourselves. We had started to set up a deal with another company but then Harvey Weinstein, who I had done ‘Holy Smoke’ with, came into the picture. I said that I thought it could be a thriller like ‘Seven’ or something. I think that was a really big mistake, because he then became attached to the idea. When I said those words he seemed to light up. I have to take responsibility for that -- I wanted to get the price up!” Campion stops and laughs, pigtail twirling.

At this point it’s important to understand that the would-be moguls were pinning their hopes on “In the Cut,” Susanna Moore’s dark 1995 novel about one woman’s walk on the sexual wild side. Although the book contains such commercially viable ingredients as a serial killer and a tough male detective, the story pivots on its narrator, Frannie. A dreamy writing teacher with a keen carnal appetite, Frannie indulges in her voyeurism with one unsuspecting couple, hangs out in a strip club and takes several memorably graphic tumbles with the detective. Moore wrote the book, she told the New Yorker some years ago, because she wondered if “a woman could really do it rough and dirty, and not write that kind of tame, Sue Grafton stuff.”

Smitten with the novel, Campion recommended it to Kidman, whom she’s known since her film-school days and directed in her adaptation of “The Portrait of a Lady.” Kidman snapped up the rights -- cue the moguls, world domination and Weinstein. Campion subsequently spent the next two years trying to shape Moore’s first-person novel into a workable script, only to arrive at a very Campion-like story about female desire with none of the usual genre beats. Weinstein, she says, “had a very dark response to the efforts that we made.” Long story short: Miramax exited the picture, as did Kidman, ostensibly because of her collapsing marriage. (She retains a producer credit.) A French company came on board and put up the modest $12-million budget, and Meg Ryan won the starring role.

Ryan’s name looms above the director’s in advertisements, but “In the Cut,” which opened Wednesday, is unmistakably a Jane Campion movie. Like the two warring sisters in her first feature film, “Sweetie,” like Holly Hunter’s Ada in “The Piano,” Kidman’s Isabel Archer in “Portrait” and Kate Winslet’s Ruth Barron in “Holy Smoke,” Ryan’s teacher comes across as prickly, off-putting and, for better and sometimes worse, forcefully independent-minded. Like all of Campion’s heroines, and in contrast to the majority of female characters populating contemporary movies, the character hasn’t been designed for maximum ingratiation. Indeed, the only instruction the director gave her actress was “don’t please.” “Don’t please [the detective], don’t please the audience,” Campion remembers telling Ryan, “just your director.”

‘Eye for transformation’

At once disarmingly girlish and very direct, the 49-year-old filmmaker, who was born in New Zealand and lives in Sydney, Australia, exhibits none of the self-regarding sobriety of many of her male contemporaries. When she talks about telling Ryan to please only her, Campion punctuates the story with laughter. Interviewers like to write about Campion’s laugh and it’s no wonder: This is no tiny burble or silvery chime, but loud and unladylike. But Campion is no lady, which she would likely see as the compliment it is. A cinematic visionary in an age of persistent aesthetic retreat, she doesn’t come across as a woman -- or artist -- who worries about being labeled unruly. If anything, to judge by her movies and all her difficult women who never fit in, settle down or shut up -- unless they’re actually willfully mute, as Hunter’s character is in “The Piano” -- the reverse seems true.

One marker of Campion’s women is that each experiences radical mind- and soul-stirring change. (“I have,” she says, “a close eye for transformation.”) What preoccupies her is how women become decisive and take the leap, how they plunge into unknown waters, shed inhibitions (and clothes) and -- as Frannie does in “In the Cut” -- breach the citadel of their individual selves by acting on desire. “I think sexuality is a really strong force in everybody,” Campion says, “and you sort of have to come to terms with it. It’s the animal inside you. You can’t resist it.” That may not always make for comfortable viewing, but as Campion also says, “I believe in disturbance. If you don’t embrace disturbance, it will shut down your life.”

Given her work, her characters and her preoccupations it may seem strange that Campion has always resisted using the word feminist to describe her work or herself. But it’s clear that she knows what’s at stake when a woman directs a movie, noting, for instance, that when she was nominated for best director in 1994 for “The Piano,” she became only the second woman in history to be so honored. (To date, no woman has won.) And ask Campion if she thinks being a woman director -- specifically a woman who makes movies about women -- has hindered her career, she doesn’t resort to the typical politic responses.

“Well, I’ve never thought about it, but I think it could be true. There’s a reason why George Eliot was called George Eliot, took the male pseudonym back then, and why the Bronte sisters did too. You know, if I could have a male pseudonym that would be cool. That would put an end to all the questions. Look, we know what it is. It’s unnamable, but you know it, we know it. You can’t even really say it and I’ve given up saying it -- I just accept it. But there’s definitely stuff going on -- there’s a kind of patriarchal outrage, you know?”

That outrage surfaced most overtly when “The Portrait of a Lady” was released in 1996. The film garnered intense partisan support and respectful reviews -- writing in The Times, a sympathetic Kenneth Turan pegged Campion’s retelling as a “psychological horror story” -- but was widely dismissed. Critics in this country, in particular, seemed either aggrieved or baffled that the period milieu didn’t conform to the decorous lines of a Merchant-Ivory production. Many complained that Kidman came off as cold -- she didn’t please the audience enough, didn’t warm them with her movie-star smile. Still others were offended by the liberties Campion had taken with the original text. For them, the director had more than just lost her way; she was the undutiful daughter who had betrayed a revered father.

That “betrayal” came in the shape of Campion’s radical independent vision. It’s no small irony that in the novel Isabel receives her fortune through a cousin who wants the young American to be able to “meet the requirements of [her] imagination.” Like any filmmaker worth the medium, like any actively engaged reader, Campion met the requirements of her imagination by making James’ novel her own, and she’s done the same with her latest feature. She’s taken liberties with Moore’s book, especially with its apocalyptic ending, arguably improving the story in the process. The changes, however, have not been enough to bring Campion the sort of consensus she enjoyed with “The Piano,” her most mainstream and commercially successful film.

Some early boos for ‘In the Cut’

“In the Cut” was never going to be an easy sell and it’s no surprise that it was booed after its world premiere at last month’s Toronto Film Festival, despite some discreet trims. “We took the dildo out for the Canadians,” Campion confides, “because we thought they wouldn’t be able to cope with that.” (The Motion Picture Assn. of America did the honors in this country, ensuring the R rating.) If she’s upset by the hostility, she isn’t letting it get to her. After all, she has had to weather jeers from the moment “Sweetie” premiered at Cannes in 1989.

And so Campion concentrates on the good stuff -- she lavishes praise on her cast, notes that “In the Cut” was selected to open the London Film Festival and that European journalists seem considerably less freaked out by her film’s sexual explicitness than their American and Canadian counterparts. Even so, she does sound ready to begin her projected four-year sabbatical from filmmaking.

“When I was in my late 20s and quite lost it suddenly occurred to me -- I was at art school at the time -- that instead of wondering whether I was talented, I would just try and see what I could do. I found I had this boundless energy because everything I was doing was what I was interested in. It was so liberating, and when I found that I began to live. I could do anything. I just had a big smile on my face the whole time. Working 15 hours a day was no effort. I still love filmmaking, but it’s not the same. Now I want that for my whole life, not just work. I’ve got a 9-year-old who I want to spend more time with. It’s so consuming to direct, completely consuming, and I just don’t want to only experience my life that way.”

She promises, though, that she will be back. “Oh,” Campion says, when asked if she’s given up on movies. “I’m just getting to a level where I feel I’m really flying, you know?”