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Review: Simon Bell
DVD FEATURES: Making of...; Q & A session; Trailer.
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.)
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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.
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