Baise-moi (2000)
Directed by Virginie Despentes, Coralie

Film Review

The most controversial film to have been made in France for several decades, Baise-moi is a profoundly disturbing work exploring the darker side of femininity and female psychology, in a way that no other filmmaker has dared.  It is also the ultimate nihilist road movie, totally consumed by its presentation of relentless sexual gratification and gory no-holds-barred violence.  Bold, anarchistic, yet honest: this is the most extreme reaction imaginable against a morally bankrupt society which still treats women as little more than feeble sex objects and racial minorities as an inferior species.  In its way, it is every bit as relevant to contemporary society as Mathieu Kassovitz's acclaimed 1995 wake-up call, La Haine (1995).

The film was scripted and co-directed by Virginie Despentes, who based it closely on her ground-breaking novel of the same name, which in turn was based on her own experiences as a prostitute in France.  The film's other director is Coralie Trinh Thi, who had previously made a career as a porn actress.   For both women, this was their first turn at directing a film.  Baise-moi was made on a relatively low budget, filmed in digital video without artificial lighting.  Despite appearing a little amateurish in some places, the grainy photography contributes greatly to the film's nihilist feel and perturbing sense of realism.  With a glossier presentation, the more violent and explicit scenes in the film would have appeared either grotesquely absurd or sickeningly exploitative.  As it is, the film's “rough and ready” feel helps to strengthen its artistic vision and draws out the  messages which it is trying to get across, without distracting its audience with overly choreographed “shock scenes”.

Baise-moi is a film which is quite clearly intended to make waves.  Its authors recognise that they have a point which is well worth making and they do so as forcefully as they can - and that is by no means a bad thing.  The problem is that they make little concession to the sensibilities of the audience they are addressing and the film, perhaps unintentionally, visibly crosses the line between art and trash on a number of occasions.  This could be the reason why critics were so divided by film, with a spectrum of views which stretched from one absolute extreme to the other.

In spite of its excesses and hugely provocative agenda, Baise-moi is essentially a good film, which is told in a daringly unconventional way with a high art content.  Yet it is so extreme that it is hard for even the most tolerant of cinema audiences to watch, and therefore nigh on impossible to made an objective assessment of it.  Anyone who watches the film is likely to be shocked - perhaps less so by the violence (which is of the naff comic strip variety) but more by the high level of pornographic content.  Even in this enlightened and liberated age, the sight of pretty women sucking hungrily on an erect male member or a woman “taking it from behind” is pretty shocking stuff.  It is most likely the abundance of images such as these in Baise-moi which have created all the controversy and earned it its seedy hard core reputation.  If anything, this excess of pornographic material is the thing which most damages the film's artistic integrity.  The sexual act is reduced to a tedious mechanical process, and watching such scenes over and again rapidly becomes tiresome in the extreme.  If there is one valid criticism that can be levelled against the film's authors it is that they should have pruned back some of this material, not to placate the censors but to avoid pointless repetition.

Where the film is more successful is in its portrayal of its two lead characters, and this stems primarily from some noteworthy naturalistic performances from Karen Bach and Raffaëla Anderson.  Both characters are believable and, in spite of the horrendous things they get up to, like a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde you cannot help having some sympathy for them.  “What kind of society could have driven these women to behave like this?”,  we are prompted to ask ourselves as we see them pursue their insane career of sexual excess and drunken blood lust.

One factor which leads us sympathise with Manu and Nanine is the way in which their nihilist exploits are filmed - as a debauched fantasy sequence which somehow detaches the two characters from the real world.  Only the friendship which keeps them together feels tangible - everything else seems like an hallucination in a drug-induced dreamscape.  This contrasts strikingly with the rape scene at the start of the film, which is filmed with a traumatic sense of realism.  The rape of Manu should be the most shocking scene in the film, but somehow it isn't, and it is this fact which reinforces the film's powerful raison-d'être.  Most who watch this film will be more offended by the way in which men are humiliated and crushed by women who, for once, have the upper hand - not by the opening scenes which show Manu and Nadine brought to the limits of degradation.  Somehow the former is less palatable than the latter, and therein lies the sickening prejudice which the film is trying to address.

If the film was intended to shock, it certainly had that effect, and probably far more than its authors Virginie Despentes et Coralie Trinh Thi could have expected.  Soon after the film had been given a 16 certification in France, the French government banned the film within a few days of it being released.  An X-certification was granted (in place of the 18 certification which no longer existed), with a promise that the film censorship laws would be reviewed.   Since there were only a handful of X-rated cinemas in France which were licensed to show pornographic films, and since Baise-moi is manifestly not such a film, this should have been the death-blow for the film.  The controversy surrounding the film, however, has earned it a great deal of media attention and it has acquired something of a cult status.  Although it has been banned in a number of countries, Baise-moi has been released in many others, winning praise and condemnation in roughly equal measure. Twelve years on Despentes returned to the directing seat with a somewhat less provocative film, the lesbian themed drama Bye Bye Blondie (2012).

Film Synopsis

One evening, two jaded young women meet at a railway station and form an instant bond.  Both have been abused and humiliated by a society that treats them with contempt.  Not any longer.  Manu has just killed her brother.  Nadine has just killed her flatmate.  Neither woman has anything to lose.  They have a gun.  They have their bodies.  That is all they need.   Now it's payback time...