|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
 |
Review by Simon Bell |
  |
FUCK me. Screw me. Rape me. Take your pick: Each one of these literal translations
of the film's title tells you most of what you need to know.
Co-directors Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi adapt the former's best-selling
book about the tribulations of two girlfriends who embark on a gruesome trail
of sex and death after one of them is gang-raped.
From the moment the killing spree starts proper, to its bloodbath finale in
an underground fuckclub via its depiction of male sexual humiliation (one
unlucky recipient of the pair's attentions ends up with barf on his balls;
another gets a bullet up the butt while being forced to squeak piggy squeak),
we're rewarded with a remorseless bombardment of hardcore porn (yes, you ACTUALLY
SEE THEM AT IT!) thinly wrapped in an empty-headed narrative of sadistic and
gory female revenge rage. Then again, I never did get feminism.
It's difficult to feel aroused at the 87-minute genital spectacular, kicking
off as it does with the pitilessly vivid and very brutal gang rape sequence
- acted out with non-simulated sex to add to the abhorrence - that lingers
long after the victims have escaped the empty warehouse. (Mind you, sitting
between Alexander Walker and The Observer's Philip French would stifle the
pant-rumblings of a 13-year-old with Kylie in his lap.)
A message delivered by way of dehumanized images of hard-ons, T&A, and
plenty of the old in-out, in-out (we're spared the money shots but, alas,
not the man fat), Baise-Moi is nevertheless a milestone in the history of
British film classification and comes in the wake of Intimacy's polemical
penis; A mere 10-second penetration shot has been deemed worthy of excision
for it's big screen release.
It's shot on grainy digital video (to keep it real, naturally) and Despentes
was herself a prostitute. Trinh Thi and the joint leads Karen Bach (Nadine)
and Rafaella Anderson (Manu), meanwhile, are skin flick veterans. This of
course helps in generating the rawness necessary for such a story, but it
still plays like Thelma and Louise
(1991) without the humour or profundity. It's all controversy and style minus
the content.
Trinh Thi, responding to a question of whether explicit genuine sex is pornographic,
says: 'Porn is made specifically to masturbate over, which you can't really
do with Baise-Moi because the shots aren't long enough.' Hmm. Thanks for that.
