It's curious to see a number of provocative French imports
find wide acceptance in the U.S.: notably examples being Catherine
Breillat's Fat
Girl, Patrice Chereau's Intimacy,
and Sebastien Lifshitz's Come Undone. In the sexually graphic and
aggressive Baise-moi (American translation: Rape Me), this
tediously bleak and profane offering makes the aforementioned French
dramas look like Disney fare. But whereas those films have a semblance of
vitality and texture, Baise-moi is just an inconsolable assault on
the eyes. Banned in France, this dispiriting film is based upon the
controversial novel written by co-director Virginie Despentes.
Baise-moi is a brutish and blunt examination of two young women's
dastardly quest to exorcise their sexual demons and psychological duress.
But co-directors Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi construct nothing more
than a rambling, reckless, and exploitive flick that gets its kicks out of
sensationalizing an otherwise needless tawdry showcase of hardcore sex and
criminal intrigue. If anything, Baise-moi is an unfocused,
tantalizing feminist knockoff that combines Thelma and Louise with
the high-stakes hedonism of Natural
Born Killers.
The film tells the warped tale of a
couple of disillusioned, attractive femmes fatale named Manu and Nadine
(former real-life porn actresses Karen Bach and Raffaela Anderson) who
generate a perverse sense of pleasure through sexual and homicidal mayhem.
The depiction of their downfall is gruesomely chronicled: porn actress
Manu, a gang rape victim that has recently killed her boyfriend, hooks up
with druggie Nadine, a fellow murderer who happens to have slain her
roommate. Together, this raging pair hits the road and gets tangled up in
the seedy world of performing carnal trysts with strange men they pick up
casually along the way, emphasize that they are the ones running the show.
After their carefree, fornicating fun is finished, the maniacal misfits
discard their "playthings" by murdering them. Nadine and Manu feel
empowered by their ravenous, dysfunctional behavior; the ability to take
life and move on to more mischievousness feels very invigorating and
strangely poetic to these sassy fugitives. In the meantime, the
authorities are hot on their tails.
Despentes and Trinh Thi deliver
an outlandish and relentlessly excitable storyline. They serve up a
superfluous dosage of raw sex scenes that feature shots of penetration,
dangling sexual organs, oral sex—all for a supposedly titillating, caustic
effect. But with all the nonchalant raunch on display, the co-directors
miss out on the opportunity to turn their vehicle into a commentary on the
psychology of sexual politics. What could have been a high-powered
feminist fable merely morphs into an outrageous and pointless art-house
porno piece. One might dismiss the gratuitousness of the film, had it
tried to grapple with something more cognitive, but it's too murky and
charmless to work as a satire of feminine angst. As an off-kilter social
statement that hints at the liberation of disenfranchised womanhood, the
film never connects to anything imaginative or remotely engrossing. For a
film that flaunts delicious-looking "bad girls," flashes an assortment of
genitals every which way, and showers the screen with the occasional blood
bath, Baise-moi is a badly executed and demoralizing fiasco that
basks in its own abysmal shock value.
Although both actresses are
intoxicating eye candy, their carnage-induced antics are never perceived
as anything genuinely wrenching or disturbing—just tiresome at best.
There's never an ounce of compassion generated for the women. The film's
pivotal rape sequence should have been more instrumental in the way we
understand this odd couple's turmoil, but that's obviously not the goal of
the filmmakers. Baise-moi is simply a sheer manipulative and
menacing bore.
From filmcritic.com
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