Some movies frisk like pups, wagging their tails and begging
for approval. Baise-Moi, however, doesn't mean to lick your
face so much as sit on it.
Porn is famously the most profitable form of
cinematic expression in the universe, but moralists like John
Waters, Nagisa Oshima, and Catherine Breillat aside, few serious
filmmakers outside the avant-garde have cared to tackle it. Rushing
in where commercial directors fear to tread, novelist and "feminist
warrior" Virginie Despentes and porn star Coralie Trinh Thi created
Baise-Moi, a scandal in Paris last summer.
Awash in red paint and more authentic bodily
fluids, this ultra-violent, highly graphic digital-video feature was
slapped with an X rating and initially limited to sex-shop
screenings, until a lawsuit brought against the Ministry of Culture
resulted in its being banned in France altogether. The content is
porn, but the mode is blatantly new wave—just a gun and a girl, or
rather two girls. Manu and Nadine (Raffaela Anderson and Karen Bach,
experienced "adult" performers both) go wild not just by fucking and
sucking, but also by robbing and killing, as well as drinking,
posing, leering into the camera, and otherwise acting like they're
in a movie.
Manu is in fact a porn-film veteran;
Baise-Moi is nothing if not programmatic. (The title, best
translated as "Fuck Me," has for the U.S. release been rendered the
way Andrea Dworkin might interpret it: "Rape Me.") Men are swine and
women are wimps, and once the movie gets going, you can count on
some sort of hardcore insert every five minutes. The table is set
when three snarling skinheads abduct Manu and her junkie friend and
savagely rape them both. The junkie is screaming throughout, but
Manu just takes it. She's a burned-out philosophe, tough and
stoical. Cut to the prostitute Nadine, another mistress of ennui,
ministering to and taking it from a john while watching Gaspar No?s
I Stand Alone on TV. (Nadine seems to derive a certain
pleasure from a scene featuring a sliced sausage.)
After Manu just shoots a guy more or less on
impulse and Nadine attacks (and possibly kills) her prissy roommate,
the women meet on a deserted train platform. Nadine, a porn fan,
recognizes Manu and they bond—driving a stolen car off to a hotel
where they can dance together in their underwear. Their campaign to
scare the world begins that night when they mug and gratuitously
murder a woman extracting cash from an ATM. "I feel great," Nadine
exults. Then it's off to a bar to pick up a couple of guys for a
standard porn foursome. "The more you fuck, the less you think,"
Manu explains.
During the course of their spree, Manu and Nadine
kill men and women indiscriminately, run down a stray pedestrian,
shave their pubic hair, and criticize their dialogue: "Fuck, we're
useless," Manu mopes after shooting the proprietor of a gun store.
"Where are the witty lines? People are dying and we've got to be up
to it." This exchange and the actresses' indefatigable smirks
notwithstanding, wit is in short supply—although this journey to the
end of the night derives a certain amount of punkish energy from its
crude editing, cruddy-looking close-ups, strident soundtrack, and
overall volatility.
Children are spared, but the movie's transgressions
are designed to offend in nearly every other way. Baise-Moi
means to put "revolt" back into the revolting. Riot grrrls Manu and
Nadine have neither the charm nor the glamour of Thelma and Louise.
Still, as depraved as they usually appear, they do have their
(briefly) kittenish moments. "For girls on the run, you're pretty
laid-back," a sympathetic acquaintance remarks. "That's because we
lack imagination," Manu explains. So does this intensely
literal-minded movie, although Despentes has been clever enough to
cite Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Abel Ferrara, and John Woo
as her cinematic antecedents.
The rampage culminates in the movie's funniest
scene—indeed, its only funny scene. Having arrived in Biarritz, the
pair pull a Woo on the denizens of an entropic-looking sex club, in
effect executing the cast of a rival fuck film. Vengeance is theirs.
Grit your teeth. More inanely insouciant than actively repellent,
Baise-Moi is too pleased with the debased romanticism of its
slapdash self to outrage a shock-primed audience. It would be
interesting, though, to see what might happen if it were unleashed
on the Playboy Channel or the unsuspecting patrons of an ordinary
porn theater.