Baise-Moi: Grrls with guns

DIRECTED BY Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000
STARRING Karen Lancaume as Karen Bach (Nadine), Raffaëla Anderson (Manu)
CERTIFICATION 18: Frequent/very strong language, sex/nudity and violence. Some hard drugs use
RUN TIME 73 mins approx, Universal
LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'The most extreme thriller you'll ever see legally' - Uncut

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT A censor's worst nightmare: sex and violence. Based on a 1994 novel by Virginie Despentes, who worked as a prostitute after she was raped aged 17; co-director Coralie Trinh Thi was a porn actress, as were the film's two stars.

THE PLOT Manu and a friend are picked up by three men and raped in a warehouse; later she fights with her brother and shoots him dead. Nadine, a prostitute, falls out with her flatmate and apparently kills her; Nadine goes to join her fixer friend Vincent but sees him shot and killed. Manu and Nadine run into each other by chance and agree to drive to Paris together; Manu forces Nadine at gunpoint to take them to the coast.

In the morning they agree to join forces and embark on an unpremeditated killing spree. Their targets include: a woman at a cash till who they mug; a man (who they kick to death) who picks them up but refuses to have sex without a condom; two policemen, and the entire clientele of a 'fuck club'. They stay in hotels and pull random men for sex while a major hunt is underway for them. At a roadside café, Manu is killed; Nadine rescues her body and sets fire to it. The next morning Nadine intends to kill herself but is caught by the police.

THE FILM The theft by a boiler repairman (that's not a euphemism) of a few of my DVDs more than a year ago was the partial inspiration for this blog. I immediately spotted that one of the films he had taken was Julio Medem's excellent Sex and Lucía, but it was only recently that I realised another of the DVDs he lifted was Baise-Moi, and this became the catalyst for me to finally get writing.

There's a lot in Baise-Moi to get worked up about: the rape, the mindless violence, the close-up shots of genitalia... But it's not as offensive as Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, say, and in its madcap, freewheeling way, is almost likeable. Widely portrayed as Thelma and Louise with guns - and full-on sex, and drink, and drugs, and no morality, and little sense of its own structure - it's hard to be truly offended by this film. That's not to say you won't be shocked.

Baise-Moi isn't the first time hardcore actors have been cast in a 'mainstream' (in the sense that dsitributors hoped it would be shown in general city-centre or, at least, art-house, cinemas) film: Catherine Breillat cast Rocco Siffredi in Romance (1999), for instance, and has used him since; Steven Soderbergh had Sasha Grey as the lead in his strangely asexual 2009 movie, The Girlfriend Experience. But here, the main artistic core of the movie seems to have been taken over by practioners from the porn industry: Trinh Thi, Lancaume, Anderson... What seemed to inflame matters further was that they were all women. These girls were doing it for themselves.

One neat little gag (the only one) comes when Nadine recognises Manu from porn films. Manu assumes that Nadine must have been forced to watch them with a boyfriend but, as we're shown early in the film, Nadine is happy to enjoy them on her own. (The glimpse we see implies that she watches violent porn.)

When Nadine visits a client, the film playing in his room, which she's more interested in than his promise to make her come, is Gaspar Noé's Seul Contre Tous (1998). Noé is thanked at the end of the film and his filmic philosophy serves as some sort of inspiration for Baise-Moi: his is an almost nihilist cinema of style over substance, despair over hope, degradation over ambition and shock over awe. One clip Despentes and Trinh Thi show from Seul Contre Tous exemplifies the level all three directors, including Noé, are working at: his butcher hero slicing a sausage.

At one moment in Baise-Moi, Manu kills a man who crudely tries to pick her up in the street but the violence is not simply meted out to men who cross the line. Women are dispatched with even less care as there is no reason to kill them; 'Where are the lines?' complains Manu, mourning the James Bond aspect of murder we've all become inured to in big-screen action movies. 'People are dying, the dialogue has to be up to it.'

In one scene Nadine poses like Luc Besson's Nikita with the latest addition to her artillery, CD Walkman incongruously hooked in her pants. (Nor do the men always get what's coming to them: a man who they've brought back for a foursome with his friend is simply told to leave their room, and does so. Another man, though, who tries to chat Nadine up with a gun to his head, may think he's worked his charm but is in for a surprise.)

Baise-Moi is not a very good film (Anderson tries too hard, though Lancaume is a strong, natural presence) but, you'll have gathered, I have a soft spot for it. When it was attacked as pornography, its directors and stars defended it by saying it was not meant to turn viewers on, a naturally reductive argument that's often used with deeply sexual material.

While the two leads of 9 Songs are actors and were hired for that reason, there's an emotional honesty there that lifts it above pornography; Baise-Moi is adrenalised caper, which its creators likened to comics, so the inclusion of graphic sex is questionable, if defensible. Whether any of its scenes work on the level of arousal, is up to you.

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 33:50 Nadine and Manu decide to get wasted and pull two men in a bar. They go up to their room for sex; the women watch each other critically, admiringly. When one of the men says he'd like to see the women go down each other he's thrown out.

Chapter 8, 50:42 At a seaside hotel, Nadine pulls the desk clerk, they masturbate in front of each other before she gives him a blow job. Meanwhile, Manu heads out on the town and meets a man in a bar; in what's a favourite move, she pulls out the crotch of her tights and they have sex.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT Baise-Moi was given a 16 rating in France on its release but the courts overthrew this, following a campaign largely instigated by right-wing pressure group Promouvoir. An initial ban, the first of its kind for 28 years in the country, was rescinded and replaced with an X certificate, restricting the film to being screened in porn cinemas. A campaign that included Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard saw the 18 certificate reintroduced and the film could finally be shown in salles.

Elsewhere in the world, its route to public screening was even more fraught: the film was pulled from screens in Australia after it had been showing for a month provoking a run on art-house cinemas (police were even called to one venue in Sydney) and banned in some 22 other countries. In Britain, Baise-Moi was awarded an 18 certificate following 10 seconds of cuts in the rape scene; a further 12 seconds were cut for the video release of a gun being inserted into a man's anus before being fired.

Lancaume killed herself in 2005, a week after her 32nd birthday.

KEY QUOTE 'Weird we should meet like that, huh?' - Manu

BONUS CURIO Advertising posters for the film were banned by London Underground for fear of upsetting French tourists: the title, Baise-Moi, translates as 'Fuck me'. (Some territories have it as the extremely unpleasant, 'Rape Me'.)