Baise-Moi
Weblog entries about the French film
Baise-Moi (aka,
Rape Me or
Fuck Me), directed by Coralie Trin Thi and Virginie Despentes.
The English-language
official promo site for Baise-Moi.
Gerald Peary interviews Coralie Trin Thi and Virginie Despentes, the
directors of Baise-Moi at the Toronto Film Festival, where they presented the film's North American premiere and sought American and Canadian distribution deals.
Film Comment (Nov 2000)
The French film Baise-moi
may be released in
Great Britain this winter or spring. The film caused outrage when it was released in France because of
its content of relentless sex and violence.
Ananova (Nov 2000)
The French film Baise-moi (Rape Me) received a rare "X" rating in its home country. Sort of a French
Thelma and Louise, the angry female buddy road
trip film depicts a prostitute and a rape survivor on a cross-country
sex and violence spree. Now a Canadian distributor has picked up the North American rights and plans to release the
film in the United States in spring 2001. An unimpressed Variety reviewer called it "a half-baked, punk-inflected porn
odyssey masquerading as a movie worth seeing and talking about." (expired link)
Yahoo News
More on the French film Baise-Moi: The Ontario Film Review Board
banned the film in that province,
citing a rape scene as too graphic and violent for mainstream release. However, the film played at the Toronto Film Festival
last September, and was released uncut in Quebec and British Columbia. This article includes quotes from the head of the
censor board, prominent Canadian filmmakers and critics, and the film's co-directors, Coralie Trin Thi and Virginie Despentes .
Eye (Dec 2001)
The British Board of Film Classification has
approved release of the French film
Rape Me, insisting on the removal of one shot but permitting a great deal of explicit sex.
This article notes, "The decision confirms the recent liberalisation of British censorship rules involving sex."
Yahoo News (Feb 2001)
The director of the British Board of Film Classification, Robin Duval, explains the board's decisions to
approve two controversial
films this week, the French rape-revenge drama Baise Moi, and the Mexican parable Amores Perros,
with its dog-fighting scenes.
The Guardian (March 2001)
Jason Anderson reviews the French feminist hardcore exploitation buddy road trip rape revenge film
Baise-Moi (aka,
Rape Me), which finally returned to Ontario screens with a controversial scene excised.
"Gleefully amoral, nihilistic and not all that smart, Baise-moi is still exhilarating. It's a collision of punk-rock
aesthetics, feminist politics and vintage exploitation-movie sleaze, and the style of directors Despentes and Trinh
Thi owes as much to Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and John Waters' Female Trouble as it
does to French outrages like Romance or Gaspar Noë's Seul contre tous."
Eye (March 2001)
The French female-buddy-road-trip-rape-revenge-black-comedy film Baise-Moi gets its
US premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival this week, and will be released in New York and Los Angeles in June.
Yahoo News (Apr 2001)
Baise-Moi starts its first American theatrical run this week at the Nuart in Los Angeles, after its American debut at the San Francisco Film Festival last month. At LA Weekly, Ernest Hardy praises the film's unsettling emotional impact despite its ragged stylistic qualities. "[Co-directors] Despentes and Trinh Thi are weak on almost all the essentials — character, plot, camera work; the actors are competent at best. Shot on digital, their film just barely rises above the level of low-end pornography, but its murky rawness is purposeful: It captures the bleak world of its characters and lets us feel their deep-rooted anger."
LA Weekly (May 2001)
Baise-Moi opened in New York last weekend. J. Hoberman praises the film's "punkish energy" but mostly finds it "programmatic," lacking in wit and single-minded in its quest to shock. "More inanely insouciant than actively repellent, Baise-Moi is too pleased with the debased romanticism of its slapdash self to outrage a shock-primed audience. It would be interesting, though, to see what might happen if it were unleashed on the Playboy Channel or the unsuspecting patrons of an ordinary porn theater." ... A.O. Scott also finds the film simplistic. "It is possible to detect — amid all the graphic simulated violence and graphic, apparently unsimulated sex that make up most of the movie's action — the glimmer of an idea, which is that women are every bit as capable of sociopathic mayhem and remorseless sexual hedonism as men." ... Jack Matthews hated it. "Shot with digital cameras, the movie is murky and badly edited, and the direction is that of rank amateurs. The sex may be real, but the violence and acting are comically phony, resulting in something that, while intended to shock, merely revolts."
Village Voice | New York Times | New York Daily News (Jul 2001)
At the New York Times, Kristin Hohenadel looks at the recent spate of European art films featuring explicit sex scenes, including Idiots, Vie de Jesus, Romance, Intimacy and Baise-Moi, which opens in New York this week. Hohenadel writes, "Pornography is a parallel world where smooth-skinned, perfectly proportioned ladies say no until they mean yes, a factory line of moving bits and parts, simulated bliss acted out to a symphony of moans. Whether or not they succeed critically or artistically, let alone at the box office, movies in which sex is placed in the context of a developed story and acted out by characters blessed with the facility for language and emotions is a more threatening and intimate proposition. It is perhaps a testimony to the power and pervasiveness of pornography that films have a hard time mixing artistic pretensions with images that much of the audience still thinks of as dirty."
New York Times (Jul 2001)
Good source of
information on Baise-Moi
at upcomingmovies.com.
Upcoming Movies
The London Underground has decided not to accept posters for the French film Baise-Moi. Plastering the walls of Tube stations with the words "Baise-Moi" — French slang for "Fuck Me" — was deemed by the Tube's advertising watchdog as "likely to cause offence to French tourists."
The Observer (Mar 2002)
Baise-Moi opened in England last weekend. Some reviews and articles:
Bradshaw writes, "Despite the hard, flat digital video cinematography, and the general self-congratulatory sense of keepin' it real, this is as unreal, as, well, pornography. It clearly aspires to much more, though - a radical, avant-garde commentary on sex, power and penetration, maybe. But the intellectual penetration of this sour, lifeless movie is pretty shallow."
The Times | The Guardian (May 2002)
MORE REVIEWS
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Charles Taylor, Salon
Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Brandon Judell, IndieWire
Tom Block, Culture Vulture
David Walker, Willamette Week
Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News
BANNED IN AUSTRALIA
Australia's Office of Film and Literature Classification has changed its mind and banned Baise-Moi. Last October, the review board voted 6-5 to give Baise-Moi an R rating. The film opened in several Australian cities in April. But on Thursday a special four-person OFLC panel met and voted to rescind the R rating, which makes it illegal now to exhibit the film in Australia. At least three theaters defiantly continued to screen the film over the weekend.
The Age | News.com.au (May 2002)
UPDATE: Police stopped screenings of Baise-Moi at two Sydney cinemas Sunday night. "Two uniformed police officers went to Valhalla Cinema in Glebe and asked cinema management to stop showing the film, which was due to screen at 8pm. Management complied before alerting their sister cinema, the Chauvel at Paddington. The Chauvel had already sold 100 tickets to the 6.30pm session. Patrons were turned away and offered a refund."
Sydney Morning Herald
An Australian Senate committee is holding hearings on the banning of Baise-Moi. The director of the Office of Film and Literature Classification testifies that 50,000 people saw the film in Australia before the ban took effect and that "one or two" filed complaints.
