 Starring: Karen Lancaume, Raffaela Anderson
Director: Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi
Year Of Release: 2000
Plot: After Manu and Nadine are brutally raped, one ends up killing her boyfriend, while the other sees her best friend get shot. Completely turning their back on society, the friends go on a manic kill-spree, murdering their way across France, as well as sleeping with men, robbing what they need, and engaging in endless violence. However with the police after them, how long can their rampage last? |
It’s odd how simply going through my DVDs from A-Z ends up bringing together apparently disparate films which actually have unexpected links. Yesterday I was talking about Basic Instinct and how it revealed a fear of female sexuality by viewing Catherine Trammell’s unrestrained love of sex and manipulation through the eyes of men, for whom she is the embodiment of evil because she takes their power away from them.
Today we move on to Baise Moi, which is again about female power and sexuality, but this time from a woman’s perspective. Although not an entirely successful film, Baise Moi makes no concessions to the male viewpoint, instead presenting a world where two women are abused and marginalised by a patriarchal society, and respond by completely turning their back on it and going on a rampage of sex and violence.
These are women who have no qualms about having anonymous sex for their own pleasure, and only get upset if the men start to treat them as objects who are there purely there to please them. They kill because it gives them a feeling of power they lack elsewhere in their lives. It is essentially two women who have been so brutalised by a male dominated society that they can only find some measure of happiness in their own friendship, and a violent but misguided attempt to take back power.
On its release the film proved immensely controversial, with much of the anger being focussed on the fact that Baise Moi includes real sex (one of the directors and both the main actresses are ex-porn actors) and that it mixes this with a lot of violence – this is, after all, pretty much the only film you’ll ever see where a man with an erection gets shot and killed. While the movie originally got a 16 certificate in France, it was later reclassified with an X certificate, which is normally reserved for hardcore pornography. It was released then banned in Australia and refused a release at all in Ontario.
Oddly, despite the UK’s history at the time of banning anything that mixed sex and violence (and even today, it’s pretty much the only reason movies ever do get banned in Britain), the film got a release both at the cinema and DVD with only minimal cuts, mainly concerning penetration during a rape scene and a gun being pressed into an anus and fired.
However while the film does take things to the extreme, and it’s still incredibly unusual for real sex to be used in films, it’s difficult not to wonder whether one of the reasons Baise Moi has been viewed as so disturbing, is because it’s women initiating the sex, committing the acts of violence and taking control of the situation.
A lot of people’s problem with the film stemmed from the fact that the movie doesn’t give the women clear aims. While they’re definitely abused by men, are they taking revenge on the type of men who’ve raped and marginalised them? Not really. Does their rampage have any sort of focus or plan? No, they just do whatever they want.
If a man in a film shoots someone for no clear reason, we just shrug, but if a woman does it, it suddenly becomes far more disturbing. Because of society’s ingrained views of men and women, two females going on a rampage doesn’t seem right. When the clearest explanation for why they’re doing it becomes that men treat the women like crap and they then fight back – even if it is in a misguided – it suddenly starts to seem revolutionary.
While the extreme sex and violence may have been part of the conservative reaction to Baise Moi, it’s difficult now to wonder whether it provoked such extreme reactions because it turns the perceived natural order of things on its head, which people find particularly disturbing.
One of the fascinating things about the reaction to the movie, is that while Baise Moi contains one of the most graphic and disturbing rape scenes in the history of cinema – it’s lengthy, harrowing and includes real penetration – the main anger wasn’t aimed at this, but at the women’s later kill-spree actions. Rather like the equally controversial 1978 film, I Spit On Your Grave, people got angry not at the protracted and horrifying sexual assault, but the fact that the women would react to it by turning to violence.
While men taking revenge is a common theme of cinema, from Death Wish to Taken, if a women does it, it becomes disturbing and controversial (even the 2007 revenge movie, The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster, faced a minor backlash purely because it was a women fighting back). In film, the only time women being violent isn’t seen as problematic is when it’s exceptionally justified (they killed so they’re not killed), if it’s fetishised (such as in The Matrix or Tomb Raider), or a sign of psychosis.
Personally I’m not a big fan of revenge or kill-spree movies that have either gender as the murderous protagonist. They seem to appeal to a part of human nature that is ugly and primitive, but it’s undoubtedly interesting quite how angry society gets if it’s a woman wielding a gun and initiating meaningless sex and violence in films.
I suppose the real question becomes, if it’s so terrible and awful for a women to take revenge, have sex purely for momentary pleasure and commit acts of extreme violence, particularly in a movie told from a female perspective, why does nobody care when men do it in films? Baise Moi may take things to extremes, but it certainly seems to reveal some of cinema and society’s hypocrisies.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Basic Instinct - Or, the Femme Fatale and the fear of female sexuality
NEXT: Batman: The Movie - Or, forget Christian Bale, Adam West's still the best Batman
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