Baise-Moi
review by Gregory Avery, 8 June 2001

During one of the early scenes in the French film Baise-moi, two women are ambushed by some men who then take them to an underground parking garage, where they are physically, and sexually, attacked. The incident is horrific, depicted in a very straightforward fashion, but it is not exploitative or prurient: the focus, and sympathies, of the scene are entirely on the anguish of the victims. Afterwards, one of the women (Lisa Marshall), who is (rightfully) indignant and outraged, asks the other (Raffaëla Anderson) -- who sullenly submitted to the ordeal without trying to fight back or even crying out -- why she let the men do what they did to her. "It could have been worse," the other woman, Manu, replies. "We're still alive, right?" She adds that, as with a valuable car that is left parked on the street in the wrong neighborhood, "I leave nothing precious in [my anatomy] for those jerks."

It is the expression of someone who has been robbed of a part of their humanity, but the fact that she is still alive does not mitigate the fact that she has had something taken away from her that should not have been taken away, and that it is something that nobody has the right to take away from anyone. Manu's response can be interpreted as defiant -- she won't even give her attackers the satisfaction of making her upset -- but it is also a sign that she has some wounds that have yet to heal.

It is also a response that I can't imagine any male filmmaker would have made. Baise-moi -- which can be translated as either "Rape Me" or "(A rude four-letter word describing sexual intimacy) Me" -- was written and directed by two women, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, and adapted from a novel by Despentes. They have made the film in a deliberately confrontation manner, particularly in regards to its depiction of sex: the scenes are staged realistically, and the men's physiological responses are not faked. None of that nice, clean, tidy, burnished stuff that you see in movies shown on Cinemax after 11 p.m. The encounters here are seamy, unglamorous, clumsy, a matter of parts and placement, but important in terms of how they affect the attitudes and emotional responses of the main characters. (All I will say is that, from this seat in the house, I've seen worse.) Nonetheless, when the film opened in France during the first part of 2000, an obscure civil law was invoked which resulted in the film being banned from French cinemas. The film was approved to be shown in the U.K. with only a few of its shots excised; in Canada, the film was initially barred from being shown in Ontario, then approved after a few seconds of footage was cut, while in Quebec and British Columbia the film was shown uncut. (The film will also be shown in the U.S. uncut.)

The main part of the film's story is set into motion by two incidents which occur during the heat of anger and push the two main characters over the line. One involves Nadine (Karen Bach), whose roommate (Delphine McCarty) nags away at her over how she keeps drinking all the whisky in the place and smoking all of their pot while languishing on the front room sofa, watching porno, when she isn't out turning tricks for an occasional client (No wonder the roommate's so cranky). At the same time, Manu's brother (Hacéne Beddrouh), discovering that she's been assaulted, picks up his gun to go out and fix whoever did this to her, but not before making a thoughtless remark about how, with the kinds of people that she hangs out with and the way she scores drugs off of them, she was bound to have this coming. The brother's gun falls into Manu's hands; she and Nadine have a glancing encounter when they walk past each other at the entrance to a subway station at night, after the last train has left. They both want to get out of town, and Nadine has a car. Their fates thus become interlocked together.

Once they hit the road -- ostensibly to make a rendezvous with Noëlle, a "cool" chick who is a friend of Nadine's friend Francis (Patrick Eudeline, who bears a striking resemblance to the late, legendary French filmmaker Jean Eustache) -- the story takes the form of a journey where the two protagonists rob, deceive, and kill. When the bodies start piling up, they figure they might as well go on a tear, for what it's worth. Both Manu and Nadine turn out to be excellent shots. They get the eerie feeling that they are able to do whatever they want, and nobody's barging in to stop them. Anyone can become a potential target (or not), depending on whatever Manu and Nadine feel like they want or need to do at the time. Their victims and dupes include people from all walks of life, male and female. They pick up guys, take their pleasure from them, and then brush them off, just the way men (from their perspective) do to women. But they also lure someone who appears to be a perfectly decent guy into a hotel room, then turn on him when he wants to use a condom (and then, he goes flaccid). No wonder people in France became concerned: this not only looks exactly like the kind of movie that people think would put the wrong kinds of ideas into people's heads, but it also appears to be condoning wanton behavior. Gunshots could start ringing and stiletto-heeled shoes start lethally swinging throughout hotels and convenience stores all over the country. After a while, one realizes that most of the dramatic tension in the story is coming from what will happen to the next unsuspecting person that crosses Nadine and Manu's paths, and whether they'll be alive later on or not.

"The more you [have sex]," Manu says at one point, "the less you think, and the better you sleep." And, indeed, the picture shows the two women enjoying themselves more and more than they had been before the further along they go. But two questions arise. First, aside from adrenals and endorphins, what do Manu and Nadine get out of their crime spree? Are they exacting a feminine revenge (as happened in "Thelma and Louise", a film to which this will inevitably, inexorably be compared), or are they simply running wild? If it's the latter, then the characters are behaving irresponsibly and at other people's expense, which affects our ability to sympathize or identify with them and damages their credibility.

The other question concerns how we are supposed to regard the two main characters overall. Are they victims or victors? Are we supposed to feel for them, or bemoan what they've become? Despentes and Trinh Thi seem to keep things ambiguous on this point: let the audience make up their own minds about the characters and what happens. But it is evident, in some respects, in the film that we are supposed to respond positively to what Manu and Nadine do. This is most troubling in one of the scenes near the end, where Nadine stumbles into the back room of a club and finds some men being serviced by prostitutes. She opens fire on them, men and women alike, and one's reaction is, what did they do to her? Surely she should know that the men are pretty much there only for a quick thrill; the women probably are there not out of choice.

Both Karen Bach and Raffaëla Anderson give unexpected depth and dimension to their characters -- Bach, in particular, does some moving, and haunting, work in the concluding scenes. But there is also something remote and unknowable about Manu and Nadine -- like survivors of a terrible war, something remains closed-off in them, and it limits our ability to fully understand them and make sense of their actions. Baise-moi will undoubtedly be talked about, argued about, and that's not a bad thing. The film has power, and some legitimate dramatic points to make, but in the end it comes awfully close to appearing to be only about how women can be as cruel, brutal, and heartless as men -- turning into, and becoming no better than, what they despise.

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