Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
This started off as a review of BAISE MOI.
It became something else. Bear with me or don't, but I'm warning you up front... I digress like a mutha below. So... with that in mind...
Before the screening began last Thursday night, John Robie was trying to figure out a way to peel off the sticker on the front of the press kit so he could put it on his car, a punk rock-looking explosion with a gun braced on both sides by "BAISE MOI!"
After the screening, John Robie didn't seem to even want to touch the press kit anymore.
That's how pervasively skanky RAPE ME is as a viewing experience. Imagine THELMA & LOUISE retold in French with more gore and hardcore pornography tossed in for kicks. Sound good? Well... somehow, it both is and isn't.
It wants to be great and important and even groundbreaking. Oh, god, it wants to be. There is genuine yearning in the filmmaking here by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, just like there is calculated shock built into the warning splashed across the ad art:
WARNING! THIS FILM CONTAINS PROLONGED SEX SCENES OF AN EXTREMELY EXPLICIT NATURE AND SCENES OF GRAPHIC VIOLENCE, WHICH SOME VIEWERS MAY FIND SHOCKING AND DISTURBING.
Controversial, right? I mean, this film was banned in France. IN FRANCE, fer chrissakes. I didn't even know you could get banned in France. Seems like one of those no-brainers. A country full of self-proclaimed cineastes who love to feel more sexually sophisticated than Americans should be the perfect place for two women to make a film about two women who kill and fuck for pleasure in equal measure starring real-life porno stars. And, indeed, it did go on to win some major awards in France, even after being banned. This thing is just soaked in controversy.
And in the end, it's not worthy of the energy. And that might be the most frustrating thing of all.
BAISE MOI is the story of the results of an unlikely friendship between two girls in France, Manu (Raffaella Anderson) and Nadine (Karen Bach). Early on in the film, Manu is raped with a friend of hers, and we see that Nadine works as a prostitute, watching hardcore porn to relax in her free time. They're both disaffected, drifting through life, more a source of frustration than anything else to those around them.
They both commit terrible acts of violence, and right after, they meet for the first time, randomly, passing on the stairs of a train platform. They recognize something in one another, and the two of them set off on a rampage across France, leaving a trail of dead bodies almost as long as their trail of sexual partners. The two of them fuck to relax. They fuck when they're stressed. They fuck when they're bored. They fuck to celebrate. It's really no big deal to them, and one of the things that Despentes and Trinh Thi try to do here is demystify and deglamourize sex from the female perspective. This isn't shot in any sort of romantic context. This is fucking, the physical act of friction, shown in graphic close-up. And there is a charge of the forbidden to some of it. When you spend an entire film with an actress like Bach in a typical dramatic setting, you don't expect to get a tight shot of her licking and kissing the uncircumcised head of a penis. At first, it's as jarring as if Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts were to suddenly do the same thing. But there's so much sex in this film, and it's all shot with such a dispassionate eye, that eventually it loses any meaning. Maybe that's the point. Maybe we're supposed to reach the same exact level of boredom regarding sex that these two women are feeling.
I think one of the things that derails the movie is the violence in it. Not because I'm shocked by it... in fact, I'm not shocked, and that's a problem. This is fairly tame stuff, low-tech as far as makeup goes, and while I don't think the film would be improved if it wallowed in gore, I do think it lacks any real punch. For some people, maybe it will be shocking to see women committing these violent acts, stomping some guy to death because he can't get hard or sticking a gun up some pimp's ass before pulling a trigger. Maybe these images will be burned in for you the way things like the chainsaw scene in SCARFACE or the meathook scene in TEXAS CHAINSAW were for me, indelibly marking me. A better comparison would be a moment from I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, a nasty little piece of work that is essentially a revenge exploitation film about a woman who is raped by a group of men, only to get payback on them, one by one. There's a castration in a bathtub scene in the film that melted my brain when I saw the film at around 13. It's cheesy, but there's something very primal and horrible about the image, the idea of it, that really stuck with me. I didn't even make it through the film at that point or until years later. For some people, BAISE MOI might actually be that kind of shock to the system.
If you go to The American Site for the film, it's a pretty mild ride, with a trailer that is actually pretty good. In some ways, it's more accomplished than the film itself. If you got to The French Site for the film, there's some QuickTime downloads that feature more of the nudity, more of the sex, more of the violence. Selling the controversy is pretty much all the film has going for it. As an actual experience, there's not much "there" there. Of the two actresses, I think Karen Bach does the better work. There's a gravity to her face, a resignation to the way she carries herself through the film, that is quietly compelling at times. Watching her react to the antics of Raffaella Anderson, the film almost finds a soul. In the end, though, the script (based on a novel by Virginie Despentes) is too thin, too direct, without anything that pulls us through the film as viewers. Their relationship really is directly lifted from THELMA & LOUISE, and it's disappointing.
Having said all that, I want to say that releasing something like BAISE MOI is genuinely problematic in a system like ours with the MPAA. When BAISE MOI opens in arthouse theaters, there's no way it can play with a rating. It's not like they make a triple-NC-17. It's the sort of thing that should really only play in specialty houses. I think it's most important to keep it away from any politicians that might wander in and get confused and think that what they are watching is real. I mean, after last week's Reuter's story about California State Assemblyman Kevin Shelley, I think the only people Washington needs to protect from movies and TV are the lawmakers themselves. Shelley actually adjourned the California Assembly early a week ago out of respect for the death of Mrs. Landingham, the now-deceased secretary of the President on THE WEST WING.
Let's soak that one in together, shall we? An elected official, working for the citizens of this state at a time when we're facing things like, oh, let's say, an energy crisis decides to shut things down early and go home because he's still choked up that a character on a TV show died?
Really?!
"Before adjourning the session, a straight-faced Shelley called Mrs. Landingham a 'great American' whose 'contributions to the nation were too numerous to count.'"
Really?!
"The announcement caught many legislators by surprise. 'Nobody could tell if she really died or fake died,' said Terri Carbaugh, a Shelley aide."
Is it just me, or is anyone else ready to go to Sacramento and chase this guy out of office right this freakin' minute!? I think I'm genuinely freakin' indignant. I don't know that I've ever been indignant before. I get mad when I hear political news all the time, like when listening to Sen. Joe Lieberman's spewings about how he's going to use the Federal Trade Committee's findings to spearhead the creation of an enforceable legal penalty for marketing R-rated films to minors. That's different, though. I think Joe Lieberman is a dangerous man, someone who should know better, someone whose heritage practically demands that he understand the simple truth: banning unpopular or controversial speech is a one-way ticket to Munich circa 1936. I think his views are wrong-headed enough that they'll derail themselves.
With this Shelley joker in Sacramento, though, I'm not angry. I'm aghast. Shocked that someone this stupid was elected to an office. The article goes on to describe how "the lawmaker" likes to call his wife during commercial breaks on the show to talk about what's happening.
"'It was tragic. She was crying, I was upset. It was terrible,' Shelley said."
Great. The show worked. It was meant to be an emotional ending. Personally, I thought last night's episode had a far more dramatic payoff, one that got me really hopped up. Doesn't mean I'm going to cancel all of my committments today just to sit around and contemplate how freakin' great it was.
This is a LAWMAKER. What sort of message does this send to kids? He gets torn up over the death of someone on a TV show, so he closes the government down for the day. Is this responsible?
I ask because Washington loves to point the finger at Hollywood, at filmmakers, at those of us who create art and entertainment for a living. Washington points at us and calls us role models, holds us accountable for every message we send, whether intentional or imagined.
There was another story picked up last week on Reuter's about a New Jersey congresswoman who wants the House of Representatives to denouce THE SOPRANOS.
Rep. Marge Roukema was on Chris Matthew's HARDBALL after the story broke, and as soon as she admitted to having never seen the show, I stopped listening. How can you condemn something as "pornography" if you don't have any true exposure to it? It's a ridiculous pose, and she's not the first politician to strike it. We regularly hear people condemn movies or music or books that they haven't watched or heard or read because they are afraid of ideas.
Only a very little person is that afraid of ideas. I can appreciate that Roukema is the granddaughter of Italian immigrants. I think it's wonderful that she has a sense of cultural pride that is still strong after several generations. But to attack the work of David Chase and his incredible creative staff and his remarkable team of actors without having seen it, without seeing the episodes of the show where these exact ideas are debated... it's wrong. And it's certainly not the sort of thing I expect from my elected officials.
If anyone in Washington got a look at BAISE MOI, and if they thought there was any profit margin in it for them, they could have a field day attacking the film and its imagery and its filmmakers. But two women from France releasing an art house picture aren't sexy targets the way someone like Oliver Stone is for NATURAL BORN KILLERS or Marilyn Manson or THE SOPRANOS. No... it doesn't really pay to beat up on a film that 99% of the people in this country aren't even going to hear about.
In a way, I'm most disappointed in BAISE MOI because it's not a subversive little mind bomb that could fly in under the radar and do some real damage before people caught wind of it. When it got banned in France, I remember being really excited by the possibility that there was something so explosive that it caused that kind of ferocious feedback. I prayed for something that would be justifiably scary, something worth getting fired up about. I wanted a movie called RAPE ME to be dangerous.
As it stands, it's not good enough or consistently interesting enough to be dangerous. Instead, it's a curio piece for those interested in what all the hype was about or who want to see what a serious drama looks like with hardcore explicit sex dropped in. It's nothing to get up in arms about, nothing to rally around, nothing worth sparking the national debate that seems to be brewing. Even the title is an empty threat, a clever phrase that uses a hot-button word (RAPE) to get a reaction, then defuses it. How can someone say, "Rape me"? The act of consent negates the rape. It's clever. But it doesn't say anything about the movie, and it doesn't say anything about either Manu or Nadine. Hell, FIGHT CLUB seemed to me to be far better at causing a genuinely dangerous reaction, far better at being a provocative, divisive film that was deeply misunderstood by many of those who attacked it. If someone in town has the balls to film Chuck Palahniuks's next novel CHOKE with this same level of explicit detail, if someone has the balls to shoot it then release it without the help of the MPAA, and if they do it with big names and with a big release and they never back down an inch, then they might actually succeed in finally lighting the fuse that so desperately needs to be lit.
Until then, BAISE MOI is no substitute.
"Moriarty" out.
