NOTE: I'm planning to cross-post this to the I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE board.
I know feminism is all about fighting back against male oppression, but do feminists really want to be seen as monsters who actually butcher and kill men? I would think they'd be after a non-oppressive relationship with men.
I dont think the two girls in the movie were feminists (despite the moviemakers could have been some, but mainly seemt to origin from adult movie business). Its right that they overreact because of suppression. But dont forget that one of the women at first kills her female roommate. I think its more like "We had enough" and then going crazy, similar to movies like taxi driver or Falling Down.
shareThe film is emphatically not about revenge, it’s about self-expression. Self-expression in a dystopian landscape where self-expression is transgression. In this case the reaction is to an oppression that is primarily male on female.
But the film really owes nothing to Thelma and Louise or Natural Born Killers or Michael Winner's Dirty Weekend (the film may have been execrable but the novel it was based on very good indeed). The motivations on display are peculiarly Gallic and can be traced back to the late C18th.
Around the period of the French revolution (a period of serious oppression, albeit in this case of the nobility against the peasantry) erotic literature, particularly with sado-masochistic overtones, was very popular. When the state demands that your life is theirs to do with as they will, when your life has been completecly controlled, your feelings and desires suppressed, an individual has no framework to define their self-expression. It’s all experiment, and this is when the most extreme manifestations of individuality emerge; the freedom to have sex, and the freedom to engage in acts of violence.
Baise Moi is a feminist work, not because it's giving us a glimpse of an idealised feminist world, because it isn't, but because it's about reaction to oppression. In many ways Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes are a 21st Century Marquis de Sade.
If what you say is true, I do not think the film adequately or intelligently brings these to light. For me, the film seemed to give the most base, simple psychology: women get raped, thus women hit back. I do not think it is a feminist film, for they are not lashing out for equality, they are lashing out because they have created a psychotic self contained universe, and anything which does not fit into it is automatically destroyed. But, obviously, we have to ask where this self contained universe comes from, and if it is from being oppressed then the film does not make this evident in the slightest.
shareA work of art does not necessarily need to propose a solution. It can just be a bald statement of what the artist perceives as truth. From my limited knowledge of the current state of France, the violent and oppressive world we see at the beginning of the film is not so far removed from the reality of some of Paris’ poorer quarters, where sexual violence is far greater than in most other Western capitals.
If this film was American, or British, or Australian, it could well be different. But it’s French, and we need to see it in that light. I don’t think it’s a blueprint for Utopia. I think it’s a very bleak and desperate statement from some frustrated and angry artists. There is no redemption in this film, the film-makers suggesting that there is no redemption possible, that there is no hope.
In asking where the characters’ ‘psychotic self-contained universe’ comes from we are looking for a rational answer. Which is impossible as the characters aren’t acting rationally. Are the film-makers acting rationally? They are bringing to our attention certain deeply unpleasant facets of their culture. And it’s worked. Get a film banned (as it has been in many countries, including France for a while) and people get interested. This is not the polite, negotiate better childcare in the workplace, style of feminism. This is in the in-your-face, we will not put up with this, style of feminism. It is still, however, feminism (IMHO).
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I seriously do not think that the film makers are "bringing to our attention certain deeply unpleasant facets of their culture" - this implies that women cannot be raped, and cannot kill in revenge, in other countries. This is all the film is about, and it is all that happens in the film. My point is that Baise Moi - in its dialouge, in its characters, in its imagery, you know, the things that make it a film - makes no attempt at a social or political statement.
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