Baise-Moi is preoccupied with violence, sexuality, identity and desire. This preoccupation manifests itself in a distinctly postfeminist condition. Despentes and Trinh Thi "raid" cinema history, both popular and canonical, for intertextual allusions - they use an eclectic mixture of styles, genres and forms, their film is non-realist and highly self-conscious, and embraces marginality, perversity and the fantastic. These are all features which align the film with a postfeminist critique of modern distinctions such as between good and bad art, canonical and popular genres and mainstream and marginal themes and styles.

Forget sex-and-desire as the epitome of female pleasure and the principle discourse of a feminist narrative; here fucking-and-shooting is what women want. Essentially Baise-Moi is an outrageous bloody buddy/road movie. Hooker, Nadine (Karen Bach) meets sex actress Manu (Raffaela Anderson) by chance after both have had violent arguments with their partners. It's a marriage made in exploitation-cinema heaven. Following the rape of Manu, the pair go on a sexual and murderous spree during which a variety of victims meet a variety of ends, sometimes after doing sexual service. Women die too, and unlike other films of the genre, it's a fairly arbitrary decision of who gets slugged and who doesn't as the pair oscillate between "devil may care" and "he had it coming to him". "We'll follow our star," says Manu, adding, "and let rip the motherfucker side of our soul." The duo hole up in a series of hotel rooms, engage in predictable forms of scurrilous behaviour - drugs, theft, a generalised bad attitude - and do their best to emulate those bad girls of 50's American B-movies but in a 21st century European cinema. Baise-Moi marries the iconography of sexy female violence incarnated in Nikita and Blue Steel with hardcore, to furthur the complexification of feminine violence empowerment and entertainment.

Alice Jardine's book Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (1985) makes cautious links between feminism and the contemporary posthuman condition, acknowledging the febrile tensions between the two. Jardine's writing explicitly situates itself in relation to American and French culture, attempting to interpret the latter for and within the former. Jardine thus takes pains to ask "whom are we writing to and for?" and in this way linking to the kinds of questions about location asked by Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva. Each of these writers has emphasised that feminism is one of the narratives that has been questioned by contemporary theory because of its reliance on straightforward categorisations of female identity, experience, representation and liberation. What is fascinating in the film Baise-Moi is the dual process enacted of "believable neologism: gynesis" (Jardine p.25) - putting into the discourse of "woman" as the process diagnosed as intrinsic to the contemporary condition, indeed the valorization of the feminine, woman as somehow intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing and representation. Baise-Moi enacts a twofold process: firstly it elucidates the explicit absence (yet necessary presence) of the feminine in the conceptual and narrative models of mainstream action/violent films (the feminine has always acted as a metaphor for the inferior position in dichotomies which have been central in the dialectical organisation of narrative disciplines). Secondly Baise-Moi illuminates the fact that femininity now provides the more or less explicit metaphor for the destabilisation or deconstruction of those binaries in the work contemporary theory. This fact is both interesting and disturbing. And yet what makes this film of importance is that in addition to employing the feminine to evoke things like difference, jouissance and undecidability Despentes and Trinh Thi simultaneously create some very original and "attractive" images and destinies of woman.

Baise-Moi rejects conventional notions of representation: if we cannot know the truth about the world around us how can we meaningfully represent it? We can see many potential dangers in any symbolic interpretations of Nadine and Manu's actions throughout the film. The potentially "deadly" effects of symbolic representation for women lie in the fact that the power to create symbols has clearly belonged to men and not to women themselves, who have merely been the objects of representation. The stultifying masculine urge to fix representation is resisted by the proliferation of interpretations in the film. Both Nadine and Manu are all and none of the symbols they represent/used to represent them. Despentes and Trinh Thi's use of porn actors in the leads was both pragmatic and idealistic. Having decided the sex should be real rather than simulated, they needed actors accustomed to being filmed in flagrante delicto.

The deliberate playful artifice of Baise-Moi, questioning the viewer, "Is it real or is it staged?" creates an important distinction between cinematic forms, documentary style and exploitation/action - setting up the dilemma "Is this real or is it fake?" This distinction suggests that the issue of how to interpret the sex scenes becomes important at a symbolic rather than a literal level for the characters and for the viewers. The question of whether or not Raffaela Anderson "really" is raped on screen is revealed as unanwserable and irrelevant, and trying to pin down an essential self is equally impossible - ex-porn actress in an "exploitation" style film, portraying actual experienced events. Therefore we have to turn to what she represents. Yet Despentes and Trinh Thi confuse the issues here as well. Baise-Moi delights in rejecting established conceptions of representation, adopting a multitude of character personas that ultimately serve as so many poses in a masquerade.

Like Jardine, Seyla Benhabib in Feminism and the Questions of Postmodernism (1992) describes contemporary theory as a crisis in ideas about representation. She also remarks on the shift in emphasis from consciousness to language. And throughout Baise-Moi Despentes and Trinh Thi exhibit a manifest pleasure in employing cinematic allusions. Their cine-literacy is wide and varied and they frequently juxtapose cult images with references to more classic Hollywood archetypes. Some of the pleasure arises from the sheer delight of replaying certain roles, what Kristeva would call a "semiotic quality"; on other occasions the enjoyment comes from knowing reference to the importance of cinematic allusion in contemporary film-making. Thus not only do Despentes and Trinh Thi refer frequently to predecessors and genres but also to the sign and the signifier, the simulacra and deconstruction. Yet they stop short of taking what Benhabib calls the "strong" postmodernist position that reality is entirely inaccessible outside language.

Despentes and Trinh Thi are as sceptical as Benhabib about the value for feminists of "strong" versions of postmodernist theories of the death of the subject, history and metaphysics. Baise-Moi demonstrates the necessity for feminist politics of substituting weak notions of all three. The episodes of "comic-book" violence allude to the dangerous consequences of perceiving subjectivity as entirely constructed and performed. Is the performance of violence all there is for Nadine and Manu? Take away the guns and the posturing and underneath is merely not-Nadine or not- Manu, an absence or vacancy. The total erasure of their agency or capacity for self-determination would result in a nihilism and the final performance that signified nothing. This version of the "strong" postmodernist position on the "death" of the subject is contrasted with the new sense of identities that Nadine and Manu achieve through the development of the narrative of the film. They have both experienced a total self loss, but each emerges with a situated sense of subjectivity - however negatively achieved - which allows them a degree of agency.

"The first part of the film," says Trinh Thi, "the rape scene and the scene in the tabac, that's all part of everyday France. After that, the film becomes much more like a cartoon, a comic strip. It's a fantasy, a rather joyful fantasy. There's a kind of irony in the choreographic death scenes… In the end, it was much better that we produced it cheaply, with a "trash" aesthetic." The narrative and stylistic eclecticism alerts the viewer to the fictionality of the film by breaking the current fictional frame and effortlessly substituting it with another one. There are many "postmodern" devices in the film, for example multiple embedded narratives of violence, self-conscious cinematic allusions, the inclusion of real porn stars as characters in the film, the intrusion of the aesthetics of hyper-violence into a documentary look/style structure. All emphasise the impossibility of representing anything, least of all Nadine and Manu. The purpose of fiction is no longer to represent reality, but to play a game: the playful excessive generation of meaning and significance.

Despite its controversial sex-scenes, though, Baise-Moi contains little in the way of graphic pornography. True the two principle actresses learnt their trade in the porn business, and apparently had no qualms about the hardcore sex required by the script. But despite close-ups of fellatio, ejaculation, sodomy and straightforward heterosexual coupling, the vital flesh is all too tragically human, serving only to underline the characters' vulnerability, and the consequences of their own desires. Likewise, rare moments of calm, which suggest a deep bond between the heroines, are shattered by sudden and exponential violence.

The film's grainy, semi-documentary texture enhances the level of provocation and disquiet. The combination of graphic sex scenes and "Manga-style" violence, even in a post-Tarrantino world, still has the power to shock. The film's heroines shoot to kill, no questions asked. But underneath the harsh surface is a serious film with a bleak sardonic sense of humour. "You'd think anything was allowed," says Nadine at one point, surprised at her own bloodlust.

Despentes and Trinh Thi's film may be regarded as pioneering a new genre of feminist discourse which has seized the sexual act as its own territory. Unlike most mainstream feminist thought, this French version is characterised by violence and an aggressive political agenda - it aims to tear down the pretence of gender equality and reinvigorate the debate on male violence. Even more shocking than Baise-Moi's depictions of male aggression are the profoundly disturbing images of female self-hatred. Despentes and Trinh Thi do not flinch from showing how women (almost willingly) allow themselves to be debased, bought, sold and maltreated.

The most controversial section of Baise-Moi is undoubtedly the rape scene - though even in the uncut version it is handled with responsibility. "We didn't invent rape," Despentes has said in interview. "I've been raped and one of my actresses has been raped …It's horrific, so I don't see why I shouldn't treat it that way." The scene is extreme; but it's not murder. Manu survives, and while the rape may be seen as the catalyst for the revenge she takes, she also asserts - in line with some recent feminist writings - that rape is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman. "We're still alive, right?" says Manu to the other rape victim. "If you park in the projects, you empty your car 'cause someone's going to break in. I leave nothing precious in my cunt for those jerks. It's just a bit of cock." While promoting a particular line on sexual violence and giving a dimension to Manu's anomie, the rape is also a narrative device, motivating the subsequent violent action. It is the survivability as well as the trauma of rape which fuel the rape-revenge film.

Furthur shocking scenes surround the "bad girls" violent response to a male victim who tries to apply a condom. Of course "girls gone wrong" as these anti-heroines are bound to take their irresponsibility to an extreme of glorious wickedness - anyone hurtling downhill this fast wouldn't care less about germs picked up and passed on. Having dribbled a pool of menstrual blood into the hotel bath to show how bad they are - "I used to stain everything to piss my mom off, " says Manu. "Shit, it makes me wanna fuck!" - the girls hit town searching for a victim and a justification. Here unsafe sex becomes another weapon in the armoury of the femme fatale. Foolish is the man who fumbles over his condom when these women have something far more violent and immediate in store than a lingering STD. In the dialogue Manu explains to her victim exactly what he's let himself in for: "What we don't like about you, buddy, is the condom. We know who you are - a condom dickhead. You don't follow strange girls like that. Know who you've landed up with this time, pal? The fucking condom-dickhead killers!"

Raffaela Anderson has commented that she believes the film's sex scenes are the antithesis of titillating porn. "Those scenes aren't done for the spectators, they're done for the girls, for the characters themselves. The person watching it is not going to be aroused…I had to get drunk to shoot the rape scene, but it did change things for me. Before, I think I would have accepted humiliation. If I was with somebody I loved and they hit me, I would accept it. But when I began to understand the movie, which was after I had made it, I realised that I did have the power to say no, the power to say anything." Dismissing orthodox feminism, Anderson likes the idea of smashing the testosterone myth, invading the male domain of hardcore violence. Her favourite section in Baise-Moi is when Manu kills the victim for being cautious enough to suggest a condom. Anderson thinks that women can be as much thrilled as shocked by the film. Whether she likes it or not, she has become a radical role model, an icon of reinvented sexuality.

Baise-Moi thus asks a central question for feminist theory in contemporary analysis: how can it embrace difference and specificity while retaining broad categories of women's identity and experience which are in the broad sense politically useful? This is a question which both Jardine and Benhabib also ask, but the insistent materialism apparent in much of Baise-Moi provides an answer which is rather different from Jardine's concept of subversive woman-authored gynesis, and Benhabib's argument in favour of the "ethical impulse of utopia". Indeed anything euphoric or "utopian" in the film are either grounded in the materiality of the body or ironically juxtaposed with a sardonic feminist dialogue line. Nadine and Manu's physical presence is continually emphasised throughout the film, as is the feminist utopia of women murderers escaping the forces of law and order and finding a lasting bond in friendship. The importance of physical materiality is accompanied by a recurring economic materialism, most obviously present in Despentes and Trinh Thi's worldview. The economic commodification of the female body from prostitution, to porn film, to mainstream cinema is presented and unfavourably critiqued throughout. The incipient danger for both the feminine form and the "radical" polemics expressed in the film from a materialist feminist point of view, lies in their potential commodification. In the present cultural condition, radical feminism is at the service of late-capitalism: merely another fetish to be marketed, packaged, sold and consumed.

The notion of "the masquerade" (first introduced by Joan Riviere Womanliness as a Masquerade) has recently been appropriated, and in conjunction with a questioning of the notion of a unitary femininity , to emphasise the processual, ongoing, multiple and often contradictory, identifications that constitute femininity. Joan Riviere's paper can arguably be read as suggesting that femininity is defined by a greater inauthenticity or alienation than masculinity - a view elaborated - though from a philosophical standpoint very different from Riviere's - by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. It may be argued that this "inauthentic" quality of the masquerade embodies a potentially emancipatory potential, in that if femininity is indeed something that is "put on" in all senses - an act, a mask, a costume - it can by the same token also be taken off. This introduces a degree of fluidity into gender identity - or into femininity at least. Such a view grounds an anti-essentialist understanding of gender as performance, as produced in acts that in fact constitute the gender they appear to express (Judith Butler Gender Trouble: Femininity and the Subversion of Identity 1990).

In the introduction to the collection of essays Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (1990) Jane Gaines contends that the idea of the masquerade offers new ways forward for feminist film-theory. Citing Claire Johnson's 1975 "Anne of the Indies" essay, Gaines points to the idea of femininity as performance implicit in a certain reading of the masquerade; she stresses the particular utility of this idea in readings of films which, in foregrounding the contingency of the relationship between the body and gender, challenge notions of gender identity as fixed and unitary. At the same time, however, Gaines implies that performativity may inform the activity of spectatorship itself, producing fluid modalities of subjectivity for the spectator. "[T]he masquerade paradigm has been filled out at the liberatory end of the spectrum and many more critics are now considering the radical possibilities of what might be called spectatorial crossdressing." From its earliest recruitment to the cause of ideological analysis, through attempts at constructing a feminist metapsychology of cinema, to a deployment at the service of conceptualising the "gender performativities" of postmodern feminist thought, the idea of the masquerade - appropriately chameleon-like - has traced a passage through all the major developments of a feminist film theory whose quest above all is for the grail of anti-essentialism.

It is these complex and explosively contradictory dynamics of performative masquerade that inform contentious ambiguities in Baise-Moi, rendering it so completely fierce and volatile.

Only through recognising the constructed nature of concepts such as the self and the body does the potential of altering that construction emerge. In Baise-Moi the single most important extended metaphor for identity is of the act of performance, a metaphor which combines a sense of creative freedom and self-expression with one of following a pre-determined script. A similar paradox extends to Nadine and Manu themselves and on to Anderson and Bach who "served their apprenticeship" being looked at - at being the object of the eye of the beholder. Of course that beholder is usually male, and so both characters and actors could be seen as victims of the male gaze from the start, which shapes and constructs them. Yet none of them seems like a victim. All are capable of playing around with patriarchal definitions of themselves. It is this multiplicity and variability that allows them some kind of control. Recognising that all notions of identity, even chauvinist ones, are fluid and shifting is precisely what gives them the leverage to exert pressure on the conceptual systems that generate them.

What is original and exhilarating about Baise-Moi is it's strong links with the so-called margins of society. It therefore becomes deeply disturbing to the mainstream cinematic and media industry. Despentes and Trinh Thi do not conform to any accepted conceptual discourse or cite appropriate references, Baise-Moi aims at visceral sensation not intellectual polemics. What emerges is very "real" and very raw giving a voice to a section of society largely ignored by mainstream culture. "The real problem," Despentes comments, "is that Baise-Moi is a film about violent "lower class" women, made by supposedly marginal women. The mainstream doesn't want to hear about people with nothing, the disenfranchised, the marginals, taking up arms and killing people for fun and money. It happens, of course, but we're not allowed to acknowledge it."

Baise-Moi holds out the possibility of a "feminine language" for cinema, by offering unaccustomed forms of pleasure constructed around discourses governed either by a woman's voice, or by a feminine discourse that works through other cinematic signifiers. What this suggests that although part of the project of feminine writing in cinema is obviously to offer a challenge to dominant modes of cinematic representation, its procedures for doing so go beyond strategies of deconstruction, in that their references to dominant cinema are oblique as well as direct.

Since the early 1980s it has become increasingly difficult to hold any assumption of a single feminist standpoint - or even, maybe of a unitary patriarchal culture. The developments of feminist film theory may be regarded as in some sense symptomatic of this broader shift in feminist and critical thinking, which may be summed up in the terms: difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity. In light of this it is perhaps appropriate to now talk of feminisms in the plural: "Many different feminisms are generated from different conditions of women's lives," contends Sandra Harding ("Subjectivity, experience and knowledge: an epistemology from/for rainbow coalition politics" 1994). One consequence of this shift is that feminist knowledges, their subjects as well as their objects, are increasingly now seen as multiple, and thus as potentially contradictory. Harding argues that "difference must be centered within feminist analyses, and not just between them and the dominant culture." Another grounding premises of standpoint epistemology is that knowledge - or knowledges - should be useful to those who produce it. To what extent Baise-Moi measures up to this context is the imperative question.

However, simultaneously Baise-Moi does articulate a post-feminist agenda and may be situated within a cinematic lineage. Since Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991) with it's exhilarating exercises in wish-fulfilment found a mainstream audience surely Baise-Moi has equal potential. Echoes resonate; when a guy on the street propositions Nadine with the line "Wanna feel my balls slapping your ass?" only to be executed without a moment's hesitation by her best mate. This seems reminiscent of Louise's trigger-happy revenge of Thelma's near-rape or the scene when the pair blow up the lecherous truck driver's tanker.

Baise-Moi knowingly sparkles with references: the film's punk ethic is laced with a cine-literacy that makes it easy for viewers to place it in the context of its predecessors. Having kicked the unfortunate "condom dickhead" to death, the women complete the tableau of violence with one of exploitation cinema's defining images, as Nadine - shot at floor level - presents to the camera her gore-encrusted black stiletto shoe, poised in a pool of blood. And as death and the final scene beckon, the gestures towards other films point us to the inevitable: shacked up with a couple who take the girls in, Nadine laments the loss of the "home we'll never have", like Bonnie Parker meeting her mother for the last time in Bonnie and Clyde (1967); the girls' fantasy of ending it all by "jumping without a bungee" explicitly evokes Thelma and Louise. More complex is the link to exploitation cinema via its 90s postmodern manifestation. Holding up a gun shop, Nadine wears a sharp, plunging black suit and a sleek dark bobbed wig echoing Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction; having shot to pieces the various cavorting members of a fuck club, Manu makes a man get on all fours and grunt, recalling both the infamous "squeal like a pig" scene in John Boorman's Deliverance (1972) and its parody in Tarantino's film.

This in no way diminishes the impact of the violent representations in Baise-Moi on the level that they are cinematic rather than realistic, but it does illustrate that Despentes and Trinh Thi know what game it is they're playing. Shock is its objective and sensationalism its medium. Many films in the horror genre have attempted to extend the boundaries of gross extremes that can be displayed on screen; that Baise-Moi is neither a horror film nor a porn film may be a source of its "confusion". Shooting a man on all fours in the rectum so the blood splatters out of his mouth is no more gratuitous than many of the deaths in horror films. What is unique and unusual is Baise-Moi's conjunction of real sex and unreal violence, the confusion of authenticated pornographic fantasy and simulated violent spectacle.

As Despentes says, "Then there's the question of the actresses. Of course it's fine to have porn films and porn actresses, but when you put them in a naturalistic drama that causes all kinds of problems. Why? Because you've destroyed the idea that they are sexual toys and brought them to life." In what is perhaps the film's final comment on the trash aesthetic of its own screenplay, Despentes has her heroines lament their lack of Tarantinoesque wit: "Fuck, we're useless, " says Manu. "Where are the witty lines?…I mean, people are dying. The dialogue has to be up to it."

References:

Benhabib, S. (1995 [1990], "Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance", in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge)

Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge)

Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge)

Cixous, H. (1975), "Sorties", in La Jeune Nee (Paris: Union d'Editions Generales, 10/18).

Clover, Carol (1992), Men, Women and Chainsaws (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Cornell, D. (1995), "What is Ethical Feminism?", in L. Nicholson (ed.) (1995), Feminist Contentions (London: Routledge)

Friedberg, A. (1994), "Cinema and the Postmodern Condition", in L. Williams (ed.) (1994) Viewing Positions (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press).

Gaines, J. and Herzog, C. (eds) (1990), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (New York: Routledge)

Griggers, C. (1997), Becoming-Woman: Theory Out of Bounds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Grosz, E. (1994), Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Harding, S. (1994), "Subjectivity, experience and knowledge: an epistemology from/for rainbow coalition politics", in Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegand (eds), Who Can Speak: Questions of Authority and Cultural Identity, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).

Johnston, C. (1975), "Femininity and the masquerade: "Anne of the Indies", in Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (eds), Jacques Tourneur, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival)

Johnston, C. (1980), "The subject of feminist film theory/practice", Screen, vol. 21, no.2, pp. 27-34

Jardine, A. (1985), Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

Kristeva, J. (1986), Powers of Horror, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press).

Kristeva, J. (1980), "Woman Can Never be Defined", in E. Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds) (1980), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester)

Mayne, J. (1993), Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge).

Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985), Disorderly Conduct (Oxford: Open University Press)

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                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002