Every sex scene in the film is shot like a porn sex scene -- that is, the women are positioned so we can see a penis going in and out of whatever orifice, and the men have all been chosen for the size of their genitalia. Furthermore, the men are almost all abusers, pushers, rapists or braggarts. As a filmic extension of the threat their heroines represent, Thi and Despentes have overlaid porn tropes with the constant threat of violence against the male partners, which is meant to de-eroticize the sex.

It's not a particularly original or compelling idea, but it serves its purpose. But at the same time it's actually the best argument against the movie's "daring." "Baise-Moi" can't pretend to be this taboo-breaking, liberating film when it's trotting out the clichés, beloved of both some anti-porn feminists and the religious right, that porn and sex equal abuse and death. And the use of porn conventions backfires badly in a scene near the beginning of the film, in which Manu and a friend of hers are abducted and raped. Manu is so used to being abused she takes the attack stoically, even managing to stop it when she ridicules the size of her attacker's penis. Her friend, however, screams and wails and fights back, and it's during this woman's rape that Thi and Despentes include an insertion shot. Clearly, they intend to put the most common shot in all pornography in the context of sexual violence. And you can argue that the rape has a place in a movie about a world of sexual brutality.

But with that weird combination of documentary and fiction that is the basis of porn, the insertion shot throws you out of the reality of the scene. Obviously, the actress agreed to do the scene; she wasn't really raped, so, paradoxically, the reality of the penetration destroys the scene's believability. It also destroys any claim the filmmakers have to sensitivity. This woman figures in no way in the rest of the film -- yet we still have to see her brutally raped. And it's hard not to reach the conclusion that the filmmakers have included it for the same reason that an exploitation filmmaker would -- for a cheap thrill -- but with a lot less honesty than an exploitation filmmaker because it's dressed up in the movie's ideological posturing.

	Print story E-mail story

I can understand moviegoers who find the movie's mix of hardcore sex and horror-movie violence unpleasant or distasteful. But I think you'd have to be very impressionable to get worked up about "Baise-Moi" one way or the other, to find it a daring, dangerous piece of moviemaking or an affront. (America has produced plenty of porn and plenty of violent road movies that are a lot better, and a lot more honest in their intent, than "Baise-Moi.") Who's going to be shocked by "Baise-Moi" among the people who will go to see it during its American art-house run? People who've never seen a porn or horror movie, that's who.

Inevitably, "Baise-Moi" has been compared to Breillat's "Romance." (Breillat came to the defense of the film when it was banned in France, too.) Breillat's film is the exact opposite of "Baise-Moi," though (and not just because it's good). In "Romance," the story of a young woman who embarks on a sexual odyssey when her self-involved actor boyfriend refuses to have sex with her any longer, Breillat's provocation is of a very cool variety. She doesn't alert us that what she's doing as daring; she just presents her sex scenes as the logical culmination of her exploration of the vagaries of desire. "Romance" startles you because it draws a line that other filmmakers may not be willing to cross: it makes it seem timid and foolish to pretend to address sex and then to shy away from the act itself. "Romance" makes every post-coital scene where the actress's breasts are hidden in the makeshift turban fashioned from sheets seem ridiculous. But "Romance" is the work of a filmmaker. "Baise-Moi" is the work of a wall-scrawler, and not nearly the fun that a nasty, smutty joke should be.

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics