# Baise-moi (2000)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    BAISE-MOI (Rape Me)

Reviewed by Harvey Karten Remstar Director: Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi Writer: Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, novel by Virginie Despentes Cast: Karen Bach, Rafaela Anderson, Delphine MacCarty, Lisa Marshall, Estelle Isaac, Herve P. Gustave, Marc Rioufol, Ouassini Embarek

Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Yeah, right. Anyone who still believes that should see "Baise-moi," a hard-hitting, hard-core porn movie that was banned in France and presumably did not make it to the Toronto Film Festival because the appropriate Ontario board proscribed the pic there as well. "Baise-moi" cannot be called dull, no way, but like some similar fare that can be called exciting to watch, it is pointless. The directors, Virginie Despentes (on whose novel the movie is based) and Coralie Trinh Thi seem to want the audience to view this as not simply shocking and disturbing or even as empowering (to employ the much-abused hip terminology) but as a dark parody of similar works such as (presumably) "Natural Born Killers" and Catherine Breillat's recent French porn entry, "Romance." But satire has to stand on its own as a literate, witty endeavor. "Baise-moi" lacks clever repartee, rather accommodating dialogue that comes across as improvised as the entire picture is unstructured.

"Baise-moi" translates officially as "Rape Me" but I'm sure something is lost in translation unless Ms. Despentes and Ms. Trinh Thi are pushing irony further than that envelope has been pushed before. The plot, really a series of random, loosely- formed incidents of loveless sex and casual violence, centers on two females, Manu (Raffaela Anderson) and Nadine (Karen Bach)--France's answer to Thelma and Louise. As both performers are involved in the porn industry, they have no problem, well, performing--nor do their well-endowed, seemingly priapic male partners. When Nadine, a street-wise prostitute who is regularly pushed around by her clients and roommate, teams up with Manu--who as a victim in a graphic rape scene which the directors have refused to edit to please censors--team up, they begin taking out their anger toward men while thinking nothing of offing women who might supply them with money. They shoot a woman at an ATM after having wasted Nadine's roommate and Manu's brother and, sexually excited rather than disgusted by their acts, they take off on a spree of sex and murder. Sometimes they kill their male partners, sometimes not--it all depends on how well the men do at satisfying them. In the most turbulent spectacle, they enter the Libertine (free sex) club, bash a man's head a few times on the bar, and proceed to shoot all the patrons, both men and women. But the display that outdoes all the others occurs when the last person alive in the club is made to oink like a pig only to have a gun placed deep into his butt before the trigger is pulled.

I suppose you could justify the movie as a take-off on both pro- feminist films and the whole genre of exploitation flicks such as Russ Meye'rs "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!," but the cheap digital video photography, the lack of wit, the presentation of people about whom no one can really care (although Ms. Anderson is kind of cute) make "Baise-moi" a curiosity worth seeing simply for its daring but not at all for its resonance, humor, repartee, or darkly satiric value. One can imagine that given the rise of female directors, we will get to see folks like Thelma and Louise, Manu and Nadine, as proof that women can be as angry as men- -that the concept of women as gentle, supportive, and anything but macho is simply a fantasy of the males who have so far dominated the fields of literature and film. Let's hope that this anger--which certainly deserves to emerge in the various art forms--will be presented by others in a manner that in some way can be called art.

Not Rated. Running time: 73 minutes. (C)2001, Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

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