The most interesting thing about the highly controversial French film
Baise Moi is that English-language distributors have translated the
title as Rape Me rather than the more literal Fuck Me. The
deeper reasons for this inaccuracy involve the thorny issues of aggression
and sex, how the two are portrayed in cinema, and how we really feel about
beholding such representations. I submit that despite the hubbub over the
film's graphic depiction of rape--and the rape scene is indeed
devastating, truly awful--it's simply the animal fact of penetration that
is causing some folks to flee theaters in disgust and others to shout,
"Breakthrough! Brilliant! Harrowing!" Audiences' reactions to this film
say way more about society than the film itself.
Not that it's a bad film.
Manu, a sassy porn star, and Nadine, a
stone-bored prostitute, each commit a murder separately. They meet on the
run and buddy up. Thus commences a brief, brutal, joyously unrepentant
fucking-and-killing spree throughout the French countryside. The film,
running a mere 70 minutes, is defiantly, almost petulantly nihilistic;
with its creepy minimalist score, grainy stock, and jumpy, claustrophobic
framing (all shot on a hand-held digital camera), Fuck Me actually
has more in common with Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver than it does
with, say, Thelma and Louise. The general attitude of the film is
best captured in the dismissive words with which Manu comforts her friend
after they are both viciously raped: "It's just a bit of cock. We're just
girls."
Just a bit of cock. If you've spent any amount of time watching porn,
you know just how pedestrian a bit of cock (and a lot of fucking) can
become. As for the rampant violence in this film, it comes off as both
amateurish and artsy when compared to the obsessive realism of a director
like Sam Peckinpah. The combination of these two factors, then, explains
the hype; it happens every time an artist transgresses an established
taboo. When the shock wears off and we begin to take the new frontier for
granted, we can judge it on its own merits. To wit: Fuck Me is an
okay spree-killer road movie, if you go for that sort of thing.
From
The
Stranger
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