LIBERTY, EGALITY, ANTI-HUMANITY :

France: into the void : Those who voted for Le Pen belong to a generation which, in the words of one writer, "knows that pleasure is the opposite of happiness". (Joshua Winter, 6th May 2002, New Statesman)

Baise-moi is a road movie with a twisted difference. Two young women, one of whom has been raped, embark on a journey through France, sustained by murderous fantasies of revenge. Their aim is clear: to have sex with and then kill as many men as possible, which they do, again and again, in unrelenting and lurid detail. That's about it. These women have the self-satisfied ferocity of a black widow spider: they simultaneously satisfy their sexual and murderous appetites in scenes of appalling degradation. This, I suppose, is meant to be a kind of freedom.

Baise-moi - directed by two women, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi - has just opened in Britain and is perhaps the most extreme and disturbed film ever to have been passed by the censors. Like many modern French films, with artistic aspirations or otherwise, it collapses the boundary between pornography and mainstream cinema at a time when there is no longer anything new or challenging to be said about pornography: the sex in the film is actual rather than simulated, and the violence has all the suffocating appeal of a snuff movie. Baise-moi labours to shock. Its website has a section entitled "The Controversy" and statements of denunciation are worn like badges of honour on the posters and advertisements. Yet what is most shocking about Baise-moi is not, in the end, the violence, but what it signifies about the cultural emptiness - what Tom Paulin has called the "moral void" - of France in the age of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The film has been acclaimed as a work of radical feminism - which may say more about the confusion and relativism of modern feminism than anything else. [...]

In the new French cinema, sex is always sordid. It is always separated from love and companionship. It is, as Shakespeare wrote, "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame". Perhaps that is the purpose of these films, in which images of sex and death are so tightly interwoven: to show us as we really are, with all facades and artifice removed, to remind us that we are really nothing but flesh and blood. Their vision is resolutely anti-humanist, in line with much current thinking in philosophy and science which seeks to show that all schemes to remake the world - socialism, environmentalism, liberalism - are doomed to fail; that history has no direction or meaning; that progress is a myth; that the human animal is hard-wired to find meaning in a universe where there is none; that life on earth is a fluke and amounts to little more than an unceasing struggle for survival; that there is, needless to say, no God.

Watching the dead-eyed actors moving in time to the commands of the directors - actors tricked into believing that their work is engaged and artistic - you understand that what you are seeing in these films is a reflection of a wider nihilism in French society. The French may be celebrated for their hauteur and difference, for their robust struggle against the homogenising forces of les Anglo-Saxons; but they are also a nation in thrall to cheap effects - pornography, populism, political posturing.

Man, I hate the French as much as anyone, but this is just brutal. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 7, 2002 12:08 PM