I was trolling Internet archives looking for an old review to reference, link and fold into a new piece I'm writing, and instead of success in that measure I instead came across this piece I wrote on Baise Moi, a gritty French film that saw limited metropolitan release in 2002, as best I can determine from my records. Its own outlier status seemed a thematic fit with some of the discourse swirling around in a recent web chat I moderated on the shock value of Brüno, so I figured I'd throw up this theatrical-pegged review, originally penned during my editorial stint at Entertainment Today. To wit:

The easy hybrid pitch on Baise Moi, a graphic road romp of feminist empowerment, is that it's sort of a French version of Thelma & Louise meets Natural Born Killers. This isn't a bad composite sketch by any stretch of the imagination, but the full truth is, naturally, much more complicated. If you're at all turned off by the aforementioned description, now might be a good time to go ahead and stop reading, because there's no way to sugarcoat either this film or the unpleasant issues it addresses in any legitimate dissemination of it.


But if you're not dissuaded by, if you're even curious about, the abovecategorization, then you may — may — be more inclined to submit yourself to Baise Moi, a ballsy and provocative thrill-kill import of uncommonbrutality (the film's translation is Rape Me, a verb you probably didn't conjugate much in high school French) that serves as a launchingoff point for a whole series of questions regarding men and women andsex and violence.

Early in the film, porn actress Manu (Rafaella Anderson, above left, given towisenheimer chesire grins of eerily repressed malevolence) is violentlyand graphically sexually assaulted by two random thugs. But she casually dismisses both the attack and her attackers. "I leavenothing precious in my cunt for those jerks," spits Manu to her fellowvictim. Meanwhile, Nadine (Karen Lancaume, billed as Karen Bach, and summoningvisions of an older Katie Holmes cast as a strung-out rocker) findsherself wrapped up in a sort of Southern Baptist triathlon of sin,spending most of her time smoking dope (or looking for it),masturbating and swapping sex for cash. United by chance, the twogrrrrrrls, like combustible chemical agents brought together in a labstudy gone wrong, ignite the subdued rage in one another, and embark ona twisted road trip of rapacious retribution, screwing men, robbingwomen and killing both.

Co-written and directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi (aformer prostitute turned bestselling novelist and a one-time pornactress, respectively — though don't let those descriptors impugn theircredibility), Baise Moi means to willfully shock, and does. To actually see thedegrading violence of a (staged, but unforgiving) rape is bothsickening — exactly what it's meant to be — and oddly instructive. I don'tdoubt for a second that if more people saw this harrowing scene andothers like it instead of the flippant, inconsequential and otherwisecandy-ass Hollywood representations of rape, from Showgirls to countless,lame movies-of-the-week, sexual assault would decrease nationwide.

Coarse, roughhewn and rather unsophisticated, cinematically speaking, Baise Moi nonetheless succeeds largely on its gritty realism. It's theultimate deconstruction of a road movie (in one scene Manu and Nadinefret over the dearth of quality wisecracks with which they dispensevictims), overcharged with a certain new wave abandon and coursing witha techno-fed, "Smack My Bitch Up" bravado. Still, the denouement of allthis mayhem — both the literal ending and the third act as a whole, whichfinds the duo, on the run from police, relaxing briefly at a stranger'shouse — seems a little contrived.

There's no denying that Baise Moi is powerful, a cinematic jab to thesolar plexus. To merely dismiss it as violent and depraved is to ignorethe thought and philosophy behind the explicitness, the film's trueraison d'étre, if you will. But at just under 80 minutes, Baise Moi isa bit too truncated to fully address either the complexity of thequick-catch relationship between Manu and Nadine or the various largerquestions of subjugated female sexuality that its narrative raises.(Remstar/FilmFixx, unrated, 77 minutes)