BAISE-MOI [7/10]
Raffaela Anderson and Karen Bach burn up the screen as Manu and Nadine, two young women so brutalised by the horrors of modern urban France that they react by going on a kill-crazy, fuck-crazy rampage around the country. The parts that are supposed to look like cheap porn movies look like cheap porn movies. The parts that are supposed to look like violent exploitation movies look like violent exploitation movies. The other sections are rougher-edged and looser, but show a visual flair and an awareness of how to use music and actors that strongly suggests directors Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi know exactly what they’re doing, even if their attempts to shock us with sex and bloodshed become more and more predictable. There’s no such thing as going too far for either the pair of women on screen (both recruited from porn movies), or the pair of women behind the camera — it’s typical of Despentes (who wrote the source novel) and Trinh Thi that they reportedly prefer to translate the title as Rape Me rather than the more literal Fuck Me, when a French-English dictionary would probably come up with the even tamer Kiss Me. Unsimulated penetration and fellatio scenes will inevitably run into trouble with censors wherever the film is shown, but in the 21st century there’s surely no real reason why such images shouldn’t be shown to adults who know what they’re in for: a Russ Meyer-Abel Ferrara rewrite of La Vie Revée des Anges.
Neil Young
25th February, 2002
(seen Cineworld, Milton Keynes, 24th January 2002)
France 2001 : Virginie Despentes & Coralie Trinh Thi : 89 mins
–