Coming
to us from across the Atlantic at the crest of a tsunami of hype and
shock is the latest naughty French film to earn many degrees of
notoriety for its explicit sexual content. Baise-Moi, which
translates as an imperative I can't print here, kicks out at the
viewer with equal portions of Gregg Araki's The Living End,
John Waters' Desperate Living, Meir Zarchi's I Spit on
your Grave, and Gaspar Noe's Seul Contre Tous/I Stand Alone
(which it features during a notable interlude and whose director is
thanked prominently in the credits). Co-Directors Virginie Despentes
(who wrote the novel the film is based on) and Coralie Trinh Thi
have crafted an amateurish, visceral, and timely examination human
fury and hurt, the kind of film that, like Pasolini's Salo,
surpasses its flaws and jaw-droppingly disturbing images to become
the kind of film that is called important but isn't watched a whole
lot because of the toll it takes on your soul while you're watching
it.
Manu
(Raffaela Anderson) is a young woman and erstwhile amateur porn star
with no immediate job prospects ("there's no work in France," she
declaims to her possessive and headstrong brother) whose friends
make their livings through drugs, welfare, and sexwork. Organized
society barely notices her, keeping her marginalized and removed,
welfared up and out of sight. It is no accident that her ethnic
identity is an unspoken strike against her, and the film scores
broadside hits on the lurking spectre of xenophobia and how it
expresses itself politically. So Manu slips through the cracks, and
she and a friend are graphically assaulted and raped, in what is
easily one of the most horrifying scenes in a film in many years.
Despentes and Trinh Thi pull no punches whatsoever, and the viewer
is left dazed by what they see. As human beings, we pride ourselves
on our empathy, and as such we are with Manu after she escapes. We
are with Manu as she is unable to save her best friend Radouan (Ouassini
Embarek) from
local thugs. And we watch as her brother, rather than expressing any
concern for her after discovering that she has been raped, grabs his
gun and demands "who did this to you?" And in this chilling moment,
she yells "Bastards like you always have to hit someone to make you
feel alive." And by then it's too late. Manu is inextricably bound
to the gun, keeping it as mediator between herself and reality.
Into
this mix comes Nadine (Karen Bach aka Karen Lancaume), an erstwhile
prostitute who has also recently shed blood (her insufferable
roommate) and watched as her last connection to life has died in
front of her. Her junkie friend Francis (Patrick Eudeline, working a
definite Gallic Gary Oldman vibe) is the only person who shows her
basic human decency, and with his tragic death, Nadine is cut loose
from society and drifts away.
The
two drifters meet and recognize something about themselves. It is
unspoken, but as Manu later says, "It was then or never." They
decide to travel together for a while, and Nadine recognizes Manu
from some of her porn work. "Does your man like that?" Manu asks.
But Nadine herself enjoys porn, and that is the first way in which
Baise-Moi becomes an agent of subversion rather than a
hardcore John Milius descent into cartoonish nihilism.
The
film's very first scene sets up the guiding theme. Nadine sits in a
bar and watches as a young woman debases herself by hanging around
her boyfriend even when he openly is disdainful towards her and asks
her for money and to leave. All we need to know is that Nadine in no
way allows herself to be qualified by a man's definition of or use
for her; her contempt for both is evident. The iconic image which
serves as the film's poster in the U.S. is of Nadine in a bikini
holding a gun. A nice little fetishized bridge between Tits and Ass
and Guns and Ammo. An image from the film that seems tailor-made to
the dueling American neuroses of sexuality and weaponry. What is
omitted from the poster, oddly enough, is the fact that Nadine has
her CD walkman tucked in the side of her panties. She isn't posing
for the delectation of the masses; she's looking at herself in the
mirror and playing with her gun because she thinks she looks cool.
The viewer may derive any kind of thrill or shock that he or she
wants from the image, but their thrill is not the motivator behind
the action; it is Nadine's. And that is why I can't honestly call
this film pornography, because it does not define itself as such.
The essential ingredient to most pornography today is the
money-shot, which you will find completely absent from this film.
Male sexuality in no way motivates or defines any aspect of
Baise-Moi, and that is one of the more subversive things about it.
Shortly
after the two meet and decide to travel together, they let their
hair down and have a little house party in their hotel. As cut to
"I'll Stay Outside" by the Cox 6, the whole thing seems like the
prelude to the inevitable girl-on-girl action, but again the film is
about thwarting expectations, and that action, which would be
intrinsic to the film were it in fact made as pornography, does not
exist. It's a scene of two women dancing together, and the baggage
the viewer brings into the experience makes the schism between what
is expected and what is depicted very apparent.
But
as Manu and Nadine careen further into psychopathy, any sort of
academic deconstruction of their actions becomes more and more
problematic. Their first victim is an innocent woman, so from the
beginning their spree is tainted by blood. It would be far too easy
to accept the cold-bloodedness with which the two dispatch their
targets if their victims were all disgusting, violent, and
hate-filled pigs. Granted, a number of them are. But is revenge
still an honorable pursuit when the objects of its wrath have
nothing to do with how the perpetrator was wronged in the first
place? Manu and, to a lesser extent, Nadine, strike out with
adolescent viciousness and lack of forethought that should strike
dread into the heart of any civilized person. "Too bad for them"
becomes a recurring litany for the doomed who cross their path.
There is an irrationality at work in the two, which may spring from
their previous experiences with the deaths of Radouan and Francis,
or, in their own words, "because we lack imagination." Their
response to the situations that life presents to them become less
and less rooted in sensible action and more and more tied to becoming surreal messengers
of death.
The banality of Manu and Nadine's psychopathology
becomes more apparent when, after several killings, they wonder
"where's the lines?" finding that they should have appropriately clever things to
say in situations where people are dying. It makes explicit the
baseness of much of modern entertainment's propensity for serving up
horror with snarky one-liners, leaving us with a sick numbness where
our senses of compassion used to be. The two decide that it would be
unethical to come up with appropriately clever and ironic phrases to
use in their business of death, which one of the film's few notes of
(very Gallic) humor.
Baise-Moi
is both a beat-down of the soul and a rewarding experience for the
adventurous viewer, but I do not in any way urge anyone who isn't
one hundred percent certain that they can handle its blend of
graphic sex and violence to see the film, because this is a film
that steps over the line, then erases the line with its stiletto
boot. It defies any kind of star rating, and I would advise
uncertain parties to read up on the film before they rush into a
potentially unpleasant experience.
From
www.stomptokyo.com
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