You
know that oft-unspoken female fantasy of jamming a gun
barrel up a guy's nether regions and blowing him away?
Yes? No? Kinda? Well, here's as good a place as any to
see it enacted with loving attention to detail. Ditto
dry, brutal, conventional rape (in generous closeups),
random bludgeonings, several other ghastly shootings and
more coitus than you can shake a randy stick at. For all
this, what's most amazing about Baise-moi
(translated literally as "fuck me," but renamed Rape
Me for pending American venues) is how strangely
charming it can be, verging upon quaint. It's like
little boys playing at soldiering, except instead it's
little girls cavorting nonsensically (and quite tardily)
through Tarantino-land. Kiss-kiss, bang-bang...and-and?
Whether or not this sounds like your cup of sludge,
codirectors Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi
have definitely created a movie that's as intensely
cathartic as it is coarse. If this project were a pop
singer, it would be PJ Harvey, who once claimed that her
music was the same for her as "going to the toilet."
(Compared to a feral fiend like vocalist Diamanda Galás,
however, this thing's sexual politics actually seem
pretty friendly.) Surely, in the near future, some
brilliant copycat will do her best to top this level of
femme mayhem (as fiction, one sincerely hopes), but in
the meantime, this truly is a mean time.
Craftily stealing the thunder of other intense
French sex dramas such as Savage Nights (Les
nuits fauves) and Romance (which it totally
eclipses), Baise-moi tells the live-fast,
die-young story of a prostitute, Nadine (Karen Bach),
and a part-time porn actress, Manu (Rafaella Anderson),
who go -- for lack of a better term -- apeshit. Fed up
with what the directors coyly define as "men's silly
little hang-ups" (contrivances such as condoms and
survival), the two women take their combined lust and
blood-lust out for a spin in a vicious, hard-core
version of Thelma and Louise, going nowhere near
the Grand Canyon but leaving a trail of carnage in their
wake. Considering the characters' chosen professions,
this is a bit like opening a produce market and then
annihilating one's customers for squeezing the fruit,
but so it goes.
The
enormous chip on the shoulder of Despentes (who adapted
her own novel) seems to be that men aren't very nice to
women, so women should, therefore, stand up for
themselves. Fair enough. (Duh!) However, rather than
taking that notion to heart, cueing up Talking Heads'
sweet "Creatures of Love" and moving on, she dunks us
into a well of smut, with the pump primed for random sex
and murder. Nadine and Manu are not merely trapped in
their unhappy environment, they are one with it, a
hideous state that predicates their reactionary ride
through the Gallic badlands and precludes any path but
their gory blaze of glory.
Unlike Wayne Wang's
The Center of the
World, which also employs adequate but not
particularly appealing digital video to explore sexual
mores, Baise-moi literally wants to show us everything. Shortly after we've met Nadine's
roommate, Severine (Delphine McCarty), and Manu's
brother, Lakim (Hacene Beddrouh), the ghastly rape
sequence kicks in, easing the burden on the directors by
rendering any further exposition almost irrelevant. It's
a wrenchingly ugly scene, but it's also strangely
clinical, leaving nothing but coldness once it passes.
Thereafter, as soon as our heroines have killed off
their kith and kin -- essentially for not being
sensitive -- they hook up and let their ids do the
driving.
It
would be pretty easy to write off Baise-moi as a
predictable reaction to our sorry glut of male-oriented
exploitation flicks (from which it borrows much of its
style and musical cues), but its fleeting moments of
pathos and humor occasionally lift it higher. For
instance, despite her sadistic follies, Anderson allows
us inside her character's thick emotional shell,
commenting after her rape, "I leave nothing precious in
my cunt for those jerks. It's just a bit of cock, and
we're just girls." Later on, once the killing spree is
under way and the girls desire more firepower, they step
into a scene lifted straight out of The
Terminator, robbing a gun shop, killing the
proprietor and then cursing themselves as useless for
forgetting to close the transaction with a witty line.
Since the videography here is merely average, and
some of the scenes of violence are outright absurd (as
when Manu caps her brother square in the forehead
without even looking), the movie's weight is carried
almost entirely by the two leads. Fortunately, they're
up to the task. Perhaps because Bach and Anderson are
both veterans of the porn world, they're able to enhance
their voraciousness with veracity; like Traci Lords on
our shores, they're pioneers in their own right. It also
must be noted that they're able to make their genitals
seem almost as poignant as their faces. Whether or not
this heralds a whole new level of acting prowess remains
to be seen.
There's no question that
Baise-moi is
important -- but to whom? Perhaps those who looked to Erin Brockovich for inspiration will find Nadine
and Manu more immediately gratifying. (When it's not
busy with bloodshed, this movie often transforms "Fuck
"calm down!'" into "Calm down! Fuck!") Seemingly shy,
bookish girls may appreciate the reckless illusion of
liberation it offers (assuming our Dubya's gummint
doesn't ban it). And then there'll be as many guys who
get off on the porn as those who defend the project's
cinder-block "message." The movie even gives us an
example of such a fellow, as a passing dude cheerfully
suggests, "Hey, wanna feel my balls slapping your ass?"
Manu kills him instantly, of course, but really, a
simple yes or no would have sufficed.
In
sum, this is a clear example of projection. These
mostly innocent victims didn't create the oppressive
forces to which the leads have willingly submitted, but
-- just like the impotent men of most action flicks --
the movie reasons that somebody's gotta pay. It's
good to be escaping the clutches of patriarchal
dominator culture, but if this is the "evolved" world
that Despentes and Trinh Thi foresee, they can have it.
I'm moving to Venus.
From
LA
New Times
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