|
 |
|
Baise Moi
(Rape Me)
*
Cinema Releases - June 14, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. France.
77 minutes. Written and directed by Virginie Despentes, Coralie Thirnh Thi;
based on the novel by Despentes. Starring Karen Bach, Rafaella Anderson,
Delphine McCarty, Lisa Marshall, Estelle Isaac, Marc
Rioufol.
"Baise Moi" is an adolescent little
poseur of a movie. Perhaps it should be used as a litmus test to see whether
you can still absorb cinema or whether you are obsessed with reading it.
Because the film has a lot of sex and violence, and because it is French,
it adopts the guise of artistic statement, and some unfortunate viewers will
fall for that. Look at the picture with common sense, and you will find it
to be uninvolving trash.
The porn actresses Karen Bach and Rafaella Anderson
star as two unhappy women from Paris who spend the first twenty minutes of
the running time shouting and looking miserable. Bach then sees her best
friend get murdered, and both women are raped in a parking lot. Or maybe
it's Anderson and another woman who get raped; the movie does such a fuzzy
job of establishing relationships and distinguishing personalities that I
genuinely cannot remember.
The rape is forgotten about a few minutes later;
it could be used as motive for the characters' later actions, but the rhythm
of the film shakes it off, and one of the characters declares, "Who cares...
I don't keep anything of value in my cunt." There is little emotion to the
attack itself -- which is the only rape scene I have witnessed that features
penetration shots -- because the filmmakers do not understand (or care) that
gynaecological detail is not as daring as emotional
investment.
Anyway, soon the jaded Bach and Anderson are
travelling across France, checking into hotel rooms, lingering around gas
stations, screwing some men and murdering others. The girls blow a woman's
head off at a cashpoint; they've never killed anyone before, but seem to
find it a giggle. They rob, shoot, break into houses, stick high heels into
chests, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The killing is ugly and motiveless;
perhaps it could be rationalised as some sort of feminist statement, or as
a commentary on how Europe's social tensions are going to explode, but it
plays as unsuccessful exploitation.
See, this is a bad movie. I don't mean offensive,
perplexing or lacking in commentary, I mean bad. It is artlessly made --
the video camera that has been used to capture its images does not create
a feeling of cinema vérité, but rumbles with the incompetence
of a home movie, and the footage has been edited so poorly that a progression
lurches forward without thought for comprehension. The first half hour of
"Baise Moi" features nothing but actors stomping around and shouting childish
insults at each other. Men are pigs who grunt such lines as, "Piss off, bitch,
or you'll get yours!" Women respond with great comebacks like, "Shut up,
asshole!"
The killing scenes form a long, endless slog for
no purpose other than to numb the audience into finding something that the
material does not contain. There are infrequent attempts at humour, most
memorably a dreadful scene in which Bach and Anderson become as self-conscious
as Tarantino characters to talk about their status as bandits and attempt
to come up with a title for themselves. It is a symptom of the screenplay's
creative bankruptcy that when one of the women does come up with a title,
she shouts, "We're the Condom Dickhead Killers!"
Later, there is a reflective scene in which Bach
says flatly, "We've got no excuses." That's about as deep as the film goes
to explain itself; it seems to think that blankness is profundity. Whoa,
man. There are more fun quotes in the film's presskit, where the directors,
novelist Virginie Despentes and former porn star Coralie Thirnh Thi, use
their own words: "Music, violence, sex, the road, humour: it's all a way
to avoid the worst fate of all: obedience, submission, renunciation of the
self, boredom. They are close to us, because they are beyond judgement.
Sensation, not thought."
Uh, huh. Coralie and Despentes strike me as the
kind of pseudo-intellectual babblers who think nonsense is the same thing
as depth, and incomprehensible aggression is necessarily heroic (as long
as it's done by sexually liberated women). What are they getting at when
they declare their characters to be "beyond judgement" and existing in realms
of "sensation, not thought"? Do the characters played by Bach and Anderson
transcend nature simply because they know how to snigger under their breath?
Are they superior because they decide to live outside of society? And aren't
those concepts essential to fascism and paranoid
schizophrenia?
I ask the questions but do not care. What frustrates
me is that "Baise Moi" has succeeded in becoming controversial, because the
filmmakers have included technicalities that will get them into uncertain
legal areas as a means of securing discussion and notoriety. Their actual
movie is not provocative -- it's amateurish and silly, and seems too desperate
to provoke. In the presskit, the directors declare, "We had to get to places
normally avoided... it's always men who have a problem with a woman's sex:
that's their problem, not ours." They're positioning themselves outside of
criticism by calling themselves rebels, and suggesting that only defenders
of old order will fail to understand them. It's a good way to seem hip, but
it's not very smart. The best thing to do with this movie is give it a
patronising pat on the head, giggle, and tell it to go away. Annoyance is
exactly what it wants.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
2002 Reviews
(alphabetical)
2002 Reviews (by star
rating)
Archive of all cinema reviews
(alphabetical)
Review Archive
Index
UK
Critic main page
|
|
![[Image]](http://www.ukcritic.com/posbanr2.gif)