EASILY the year's most controversial movie,
"Baise Moi"
(whose French title is being translated as "Rape Me," though
it's far more obscene) treads a very fine line between art and
exploitation.
There's obviously been no simulating the explicit sex,
including penetration, which leaves nothing to the
imagination.
It's hard-core action being performed by the stars, two
female veterans of porn films, along with impressively endowed
men from the same acting pool.
"Baise-Moi" also boasts an extremely graphic and violent
rape scene that sent at least two women running for the exit
at the screening I attended.
This is what prompted even the very liberal French to ban
the flick - and made it a hot ticket at film festivals.
Basically a cross between "Thelma and Louise" and Russ
Meyer's "Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill," this is a supposedly
satirical road film about a pair of nihilistic women who go on
a sex-and-killing rampage after one of them is raped.
The victim is Manu
(Raffaella Anderson), who's brutally
attacked along with a female junkie in a garage.
She's relatively nonchalant about this, but soon shoots a
man on the street with his own gun and makes off with his
cash.
Eventually she hooks up with the relatively clean-cut
Nadine (Karen Bach), who's strangled her roommate.
They team up to bludgeon a woman at an ATM and use the
proceeds to buy booze - and have sex with lots of guys.
If they don't like the sex, they kill the guy.
That's basically it, presented as a comic fable of female
empowerment by co-directors Virginia Despentes, who adapted
her novel, and Coralie Trinh Thi, whose previous assignments
were in the adult film industry.
That's pretty obvious from the footage, which features
oral, anal and vaginal sex in clinical detail rarely seen
outside porn.
Some may find it titillating; more will find it offensive
and deeply disturbing.
The actresses, particularly Anderson, give better
performances than you might expect, given their backgrounds.
But this is a crude piece of work, unfocused, slackly
structured and rambling, even at 77 minutes.
Shot on grainy digital video, it looks like hell, which may
have been the intention. And the co-directors never really
establish a consistent point of view or tone.
"Baise-Moi" is a talker, to be sure - but it will make you
squirm to watch the basest human instincts played out outside
any moral context.
From
NY
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