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How far out does a movie have to be for it to get banned in France? Baise-Moi (Fuck Me), the film that
Virginie Despentes adapted from her novel and co-directed with Coralie Trin-Thi,
can’t be shown in its home country. After seeing it, though, I think France might be
on to something. One needn’t mind about the movie’s morals—Baise-Moi is an extreme aesthetic hazard. France
has merely exported an undesirable element, the same way that Cuba once sent us a flotilla
of their criminal and insane. Forget that we’ve somehow reached the point where
France makes movies that they can’t show, while America shows movies that it
can’t make. Now that the French have taken the first step and banned Baise-Moi, the sensible thing to do is to finish
the job by putting every print of it into a rocket-ship and shooting it into space. The
world needs this movie the way it needs a comeback of the plague.
Baise-Moi opens in a city outside France, and at
first it seems it’s going to be a multi-character tapestry set in a Gorkiesque
universe of the destitute and abandoned. In a few short minutes it introduces a cluster of
junkies, hookers, and gangsters, and moves between them with such little change in
emphasis that it takes a while to figure out that the main characters are Nadine (Karen
Bach), a soul-deadened streetwalker who’s happiest masturbating to pornographic
videos, and a bitter little cupcake named Manu (Raffaela Anderson). The two young women
hook up just as their lives have taken dramatic (and violent) turns, and to pass some time
and blow off some energy, they set out on a roadtrip. But their jaunt quickly turns into a
killing spree: as the two little burnouts drive cross-country, they begin murdering
people, first for money, then for kicks.
They’re
also sexually insatiable, and it was Baise-Moi’s
sexual content that got it banned. Manu and Nadine pick up a variety of men with whom they
have sexual encounters, and the movie’s generous helpings of sex are all unmistakably
real. No body doubles were used, not even in the porno-style close-ups of penetrated
cavities; it truly is the actors’ cleaved and jouncing genitalia that we see slamming
away at each other. (Some of the cast members, including Bach, appear under pseudonyms.)
And when there isn’t any sex, the movie falls back on its violence. At least it isn’t real, but it’s still not meant
for the faint of heart. In addition to its multiple shootings, Baise-Moi includes bludgeonings, stompings, a
horrific double gang-rape, and one truly arcane delight: a man getting shot by a gun
that’s been pushed up his rectum. Despentes casts a romantic pall over the movie as
Manu and Nadine near the end of their rampage, but by that time it’s hard to
understand why she’d even bother; the audience is far too numbed by excess to respond
to her characters any more.
Baise-Moi’s title is a dare: “Fuck me and
see what happens to you.” At the beginning, Manu and Nadine are pinned under
society’s thumb, crushed by poverty and brutalized by the men in their lives. For the
first third of the movie their killing-and-sex spree seems like the result of a conscious
decision to be out of control—a desperate push for empowerment by people who can
never know real power. It’s an idea that could be worthwhile in the hands of a
filmmaker with a keen moral edge and the imagination to make it sing, but for Despentes
it’s merely a pegboard on which to hang unexamined assumptions about sexual politics
and the effect of pop culture on modern life. Despite its assault on cinematic taboos, Baise-Moi is an academic work; its ideas feel like
they were incubated in a college classroom, and its anger is strictly for show.
About halfway through its running
time, Baise-Moi veers from grungy naturalism
towards a Godardian self-awareness when Manu complains to Nadine that as killers they
should be talking in snappy patter—in movie talk. And whereas their early killings
are presented with a casual sense of verite,
the movie’s climax sees them striking the statued postures of Tarantino’s
photogenic gunmen as they slaughter the clients of a sex club. Despentes is saying that
exposure to mass culture is deforming our identities, but at this stage of the game
that’s about as bracing an idea as the notion that people are bipeds. In Terrence
Malick’s Badlands a young couple embarks on a killing
spree in part because they’ve derived their understanding of life from pop culture,
but their characters are also inflected by other things—a truly alien notion of
gentility, and their complicated response to Nature. Manu and Nadine are stripped of any
sensitivity or context; they’re just mechanical birds being made to sing in the
little cage that Despentes has trapped them in. Even their youth (despite her ripe body,
Manu has the face and manner of a 15-year old) doesn’t express anything about
whatever generational tensions may be gripping France today; this duo seems no more
representative of youth at large than the killers at Columbine High did. When will the
punks (and the post-punk punks) realize that these one-note howls of disaffection are
radical only on their surface—that they’re just as sour and limiting as
complacency is for the bourgeoisie?
- Tom Block
