Review

This outrageously controversial film is based on the novel by co-director Virginie Despentes. Manu and Nadine are marginal women, involved in the sex industry, they lose their last tenuous relationship with main-stream society when Manu gets raped and Nadine sees her only friend being shot. After a chance encounter, they embark on an explosive journey of sex and murder in revenge for the rape and all the abuse they have suffered at the hands of men.

Baise Moi, literally "kiss me" (translated into the English as "rape me" - ah, the puritan obsession with making the sacred profane...), is an ambitious film that uses music video editing, crosses Thelma and Louise with Hard-Boiled, puts the twin cherries of depravity and hardcore porn on top, and finally leaves the viewer wondering "what have we become?"

Maybe that is the point: this film tells you nothing. Nothing about character motive beyond the action-based obvious: the deep personal histories are left to a Beckett-style surmise, consumed by the overwhelming politics of gender. Nothing about the culture: it is not obvious to a foreigner like me, in part because it is set in French-on-the-dole-daytime-ghetto, largely absent the working majority, absent authority (outside of the end-game appearance of the cops) and certainly absent life goals or coherence. It is instead a universal, internal hell; a referendum on the torture and numbness of the "nothing" that is dis-empowered living, maybe post-modern living.

In any event, the case is made: the plight of women in French society is ironically cartooned using Krylon cans filled with male violence, degradation of women, male psychosis and finally the "reality TV" rape of two women. This rape is the moment of conversion. One chastises the other for not fighting and so self-hate consummates the encounter between two women, as it always does in this analysis. The disease is inflamed; the stage is set.

The antidote, liberation, is sought in the categorical anti-male psychosis that ensues. Through a well done but stilted crossing of paths, the protagonists meet: one woman who watches porn and masturbates openly, the other one of the rape victims. "I know you from pornos!" and the rape victim is revealed as a sex worker, a woman whose whole existence is consumed by the male sex-ghetto. The sidekick-voyeur, the porn watcher, is at first forced at gunpoint, but falls quickly in line when she feels and accepts the possibilities.

Our heroines arrive at the beach, instead opt for a maternal friendship, and then "head for the (metaphoric) border". They spend time loading up on "through-the-looking-glass" equality: guns, random killing of men and women,having sex with submissives and murdering overconfident males, robbery. It is the perfect exercise in taking, rather than being taken from (in this world, giving comes with strings, strings which take back - note the bartender in the early scenes - there is no giving in this world). The spectre of borrowed time shadows the whole game - one must wake with a hangover - clearly and effortlessly. And what about the end of the movie? That is up to you to see.

Overall it was pugnacious, ideological, and finally both more sophisticated and more simple-minded (in other words, French) than most Americans - perhaps anybody - will tolerate easily. It has a hardcore rape scene and a guy getting shot with a gun stuck in his anus. (French with English subtitles)