"Baise-Moi"

A new wave of bloodily pornographic French art films hits a new low in this ultraviolent tale of two murderous women on the lam.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 13, 2001 | When did French movies get so nasty? In the past few years, French cinema has had a "transgressive" strain operating at full tilt. At one end there's been the unsimulated sex in Leos Carax's "Pola X" and Catherine Breillat's "Romance." At the other there's the brutality of Bruno Dumont's "L'Humanité," which features a lingering shot of a woman's vagina after she has been raped and murdered; Gaspar Noé's "Seul Contre Tous" (released here as "I Stand Alone"), in which the butcher protagonist beats his pregnant wife and indulges in a fantasy of having sex and then murdering his mentally retarded daughter.

I couldn't even bring myself to see Michael Haneke's "Funny Games," which deals with two psychos who invade a family's home and murder them all. And the current issue of French "Premiere" includes some eye-popping blood-drenched images from Claire Denis' coming vampire and cannibalism movie "Trouble Every Day."

But with the exception of Breillat's "Romance," a cold and ferocious movie, most of these films have been too calculated to be truly disturbing. The crotch shot of "Humanite" could even be used in art-history exams with students asked to name the art work it's based on, Duchamp's "Étant donnés." (A later crotch shot is based on Courbet's "The Origin of the World.") And in "Seul Contre Tous," Noé uses a device that's pure William Castle. Just before the big sex-and-murder finale, a title flashes on the screen telling us we have 30 seconds to leave the theater. It's followed a few seconds later by a big red title flashing "WARNING."

There's a strain of smug self-satisfaction in the way these movies set out to shock their audience, an adolescent devotion to épater le bourgeoisie. Next to the work being done in the French cinema by the likes of Olivier Assayas, Martine Dugowson and Claire Denis, and the vitality that still shines from the work of Jacques Rivette, Agnàs Varda and Chris Marker, these pictures seem like the equivalent of those novels by hot young writers that are publicized on the basis of how raw and shocking they are.

This new subgenre of French cinema reaches some sort of apotheosis with "Baise-Moi," which is being released here under the title "Rape Me," presumably because the correct translation "Fuck Me" wouldn't get into newspapers or on a billboard. "Baise-Moi" proved to be even a bit too much for the French. Three days after its release and following complaints from right-wing politicians, the movie was reclassified with a rating that effectively banned it from all but a few French porno houses. In a way, that's appropriate, because "Baise-Moi" is porn. (Being a fan of porn, I should note that I use that word purely descriptively, not pejoratively.)

The co-director Coralie Trinh Thi (she made the film with Virginie Despentes, on whose novel it's based) has worked in the French porn industry, as have the two lead actresses, Raffaëla Anderson and Karen Bach (also known as Karen Lancaume). That's fortunate, since they're called on to perform hardcore sex scenes throughout the movie.

The story follows two women, the tall, slightly zonked hooker Nadine (Bach), and the diminutive Manu (Anderson), a sometime porn actress. After each commits a murder and goes on the lam, they meet up and go on a sex-and-murder spree that's motivated by nothing more than boredom. "Baise-Moi" is basically feminist pulp made by people who swallowed Sartre whole. (I'm speaking figuratively; Sartre does not appear in the film.) Life is deadening, spirit-destroying, so these two have made the decision to feel alive by fucking and/or killing whoever crosses their path. Their first murder is a woman they rob at an ATM machine; another victim is a guy they pick up and turn against when he wants to use a condom. Kicking him to death, they proclaim themselves "the condom dickhead killers!"

In classic, dime-store existential fashion, the women are presented as freer than the society whose rules they shun. But there's no charm, no wit to these characters. They have nothing like the grubby capacity for joy you see in the sometimes brutal drifters played by Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere in Bertrand Blier's "Going Places," a movie that, nearly 30 years after it was made, still has the power to unsettle you.

So, even with a running time of 77 minutes, the piling up of sex and murders in "Baise-moi" becomes rote. And the static quality is the movie's rigid point: Whenever they're not fucking or killing, the women are blanks, stone-faced, bored. "Baise-Moi," which is didactic, clumsily directed and abysmally acted, never lets go of its intellectualized approach long enough to deliver any real kinetic thrills.

Next Page: An art film shot like a porn film

• View blog reactions