I DIDN'T THINK much of Baise-moi, but at least I
felt as if I'd seen an underground movie for a change. The title can be
translated as "Kiss Me," "Fuck Me" or "Rape Me"--as if there were no
difference among the three. The heroines can't tell, and neither can
co-directors Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes. The film begins
with an atmospheric but discursive 15 minutes showing the film's two
heroines kicked around by men and the welfare state. While they're getting
drunk in the bad part of Paris, Manu and Nadine are subjected to a
graphic-XXX rape. The small feral girl Manu (Raffaëlla Anderson) endures
the assault numbly and says something memorable: she emptied herself of
feeling, just like you'd empty your car of valuables if you left it in a
bad neighborhood. Nadine, the other victim, is played by Karen Bach. Like
Anderson, she's a porn star in real life. Now radicalized, the two launch
a crime spree.
This kind of movie is old enough to have its own
subgenre,
from Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! to Ms. 45. And during the
slack spots, I had to wonder whether it was true that critics get jaded.
"Jaded" is a word for critics whose memories are too long for the film
industry's convenience. However, you do end up seeing the same kind of
film over the years, and you want to ask, "What's new this time?" Is the
best thing to be said about Baise-moi that "youth must be served"?
Baise-moi is a rebellion movie that doesn't stint the sex and
violence, and tries (and fails) to stay anarchic.
These girl-devils--pretty, as today's rebels have to
be--enjoy shagging as well as killing, but they have their proper limits.
They indulge in an ooh-la-la underwear dance to show how turned on they
are by each other, but when a male lover asks the women to put on a show,
they kick him out of the hotel for his dirty impudence. As a grand finale,
they massacre a room full of swingers. We're meant to think of the
shootings as justice: death is what these filthy sex fiends deserve. What
does their swap club have to do with social injustice? Is sex only
liberating when these two girls decide it is? Or does the massacre show
their opinion of the perverted bourgeois class?
Baise-moi is at its wittiest suggesting that the
heroines are dull women without imagination. At one moment, Manu draws a
blank: she can't think of any postmurder quips. At another, the two
vengeful harpies rob a liberal, and he starts trying to smooth their
feathers ("You must have be full of pain"). Remember that Situationalist
maxim based on an infamous Goebbels quote: "A liberal is someone who, when
he hears the word 'revolver,' reaches for his culture?" You want the
dialogue to continue; maybe one of the killer girls would be persuaded by
his comforting social worker's logic and get into an argument with her
partner about the psycho-cultural reasons they both went on the warpath.
Unfortunately, this scene ends where all the other scenes end: with the
raspberry jam splattered against the wall. The French like to complain
about the pernicious influence of American films on their movies: here's
an example of how far Yank movie aesthetics has spread. Even one France's
most erstwhile dangerous exports can't fathom a way to end an intellectual
argument except with the trigger pulled again and again.
From
Metro Active
<
BACK