The language of angry girls: "Baise-moi" (2000)

*This text was written for the commentary session of Baise-moi in the context of the showcase"When I am the other: doubles, mirrors and imitations", held between August 14 and September 6, 2025, at the Cine Humberto Mauro, in Belo Horizonte. I thank the curator, Luiz Fernando Coutinho, and the cinema manager, Vítor Miranda, for the invitation.

A punk teenager's voice that learned to speak with a male cisgender production program, an aristocratic mind of a futuristic she-wolf inhabiting a prostitute's body, the intelligence of a Nobel Prize winner embodied in a stray dog's body. A biopolitical miracle: evidence that new genetic-political and literary recombinations are possible. She rises and dances before the curtainless window to the glory of the neighborhood. All new generations of little lesbians can be found in the body that houses this voice, in its neural territories. Come, girls, those who wear veils, and those who don't, those who have children and those who don't, those who suck dicks and those who don't, those who want a mustache and those who don't. Come. Take it and eat it.

Paul B. Preciado, on VD

Preliminaries: starting with a scene

Regan still has a tender complexion when two astonished doctors enter her room. The girl writhes fiercely on the turquoise-blue sheet of her bed until, between screams, her eyeballs fold in their sockets. She assumes a deep voice that seems to split her in two: from her childlike and small figure overflows the purulent verb of the virile demon: “Fuck me.” Baise-moi. With the vomit of the monstrous girl who, in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), embodies masculine terrors, the writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes christens her masterpiece – just like Regan, a small devil duplicated, in the form of book and film.

In France, the film version of this semi-autobiographical pulp -porn-feminist novel, produced in the early 2000s, a few years after the writing of the book that inspired it, was censored, amid protests from the far-right, three days after its premiere. In the United States, its title was translated as "Rape Me," presumably because its literal meaning would not be tolerated in newspapers or on billboards. It was easier to assimilate the pleading masochism of women who do not shy away from patriarchal destiny than the raw and ambiguous imperative of the desire to fuck and be fucked.

The brutality of the film form also horrified audiences. Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, co-director, lacked the aesthetic refinement of a Catherine Breillat, accused some of the specialized press, disgusted by the visual poverty of the video technology – despite the concrete support the filmmaker offered to Baise-moi , even organizing demonstrations in its favor. Roger Ebert described it as a bluff: “ The directors know that their film is so extreme that most will feel repulsed, but some will create intellectual defenses and interpretations for it, sparing them the work of making clear what they want to say. I can't swallow it.” Like Manu , who, in a certain scene, regurgitates the stick she puts in her mouth, the reviewers choked on this orgasmic burst of anti-femininity and counter-cinema.

The alpha female kills angels of the home (quoting Virginia Woolf)

Before embracing the feminist movement, Despentes dabbled in the European anarcho-punk movement of the 1980s. A hitchhiker – the only way to feed her obsession and hunger for rock concerts – she was a seventeen-year-old girl, wearing red Converse sneakers and with green hair, when she and a friend were raped by three men in a pickup truck with a shotgun. The helplessness in the middle of the road left her with raw wounds. As always, she sought solace and guidance in books. However, for the first time, she encountered the impotence of language, incapable of expressing her traumas. The fundamental violence of domesticated, obedient, ashamed, and normative femininity had, until then, managed to evade the ontological force of the written word.

This historical and tactical silence would be shattered, however, by Camille Paglia. In Despentes' synthesis, in his King Kong Theory , the American theorist is said to have stated, in an article for Spin magazine in the 1990s , that rape is:

An unavoidable risk, a risk that women must take into account and accept if they wish to leave home and move around freely. If this happens to you, hold your head high, dust yourself off , and bounce back. And if it scares you too much, it's better to stay at your parents' house getting your nails done. (Despentes, 2016, p. 34)

Doors aren't broken down with subtlety. After the immediate outrage caused by this dry and symbolic blow, Despentes understood that, from then on, nothing would remain "closed, locked as before".

She [Camille Paglia] urged us to consider rape as an inevitable risk, inherent to our condition as girls. An incredible freedom of de-dramatization. Yes, we had left home, reaching a space that was not meant for us. Yes, we had survived instead of dying. Yes, we wore miniskirts without being accompanied by a guy, at night, yes, we were stupid and weak and incapable of breaking their faces, weak as girls learn to be when they are assaulted. Yes, it had happened to us, but, for the first time, we understood what we had done: we had gone out into the street because, inside our parents' house, nothing interesting happened. We took the risk, we paid the price, and more than being ashamed of being alive, we could now decide to get up and recover in the best way possible. [...] She was the first to take rape out of the absolute horror, out of the unspoken, out of that which above all should never happen. She turned rape into a political circumstance, something we should learn to confront. Paglia transformed everything: it wasn't about denying or succumbing, it was about living with it. (Despentes, 2016, pp. 35-36)

In turn, and according to her, Baise-moi would only implode the narrative impossibility of rape when Despentes becomes and understands herself as a public figure – initially, not through the established path of literature, speaking “of what should remain secret,” but through the obscene and obscure ghetto of prostitution. In both professions, begun simultaneously (and not by chance, according to her), she opposed the seclusion of “the place reserved for us.” She also rejected the self-imposed confinement expected of the dignified victim: with a single gesture, Despentes opened her legs, ideas, and shared wounds.

The book, conceived in April 1992, was rejected by nine publishers before being accepted by Florent Massot in 1993. It gradually gained fame as the author penetrated less marginal media circuits. She teamed up with three pornographic actresses – the aforementioned Coralie Trinh Thi and the protagonists Karen Bach and Raffaëla Anderson – to adapt her version of Thelma and Louise with exposed entrails, the hallucinatory saga of Manu and Nadine, the "degenerate sluts," Siamese twin killers of "plastic penises" and educated bourgeois, who, in the words of a third character,

never touch, but they keep an eye on each other, constantly searching for one another. When they laugh, it's always about the same thing, and they're always close. When one lights a cigarette, she automatically hands it to the other, without pausing. They finish each other's sentences repeatedly, or say something at the same time. They always pour two glasses. Without realizing they're doing it. They use the same words, the same expressions. You can feel they're in cahoots. Like a two-headed animal, kind of fascinating, actually. (Despentes, 1999).

After Baise-moi , Despentes continued to unleash her tongue, swallowing taboos and giving birth to indigestible creatures. Bye Bye Blondie , another autobiographical book about the tempestuous reunion between Gloria, a destitute woman, and TV presenter Erick Muir, who meet during adolescence in the 1980s after a compulsory psychiatric hospitalization, was adapted to screen with a lesbian storyline and sassiness, again by Despentes herself. By this time, she had already abandoned heterosexuality and converted, according to the designs of Paul B. Preciado, her longtime partner, into "the whore of lesbians and trans people, the boss of the tomboys." King Kong Theory , from 2006, woven between frenetic vices, smoking and sex, consolidated her position in the publishing market as a gender terrorist excluded from the "good girl market."

It's impossible to rape porn witches.

But Baise-moi, in its dual materiality, remains, to this day, denied to the legitimate cultural realm. In the driving event of this road trip, the close-up of the violated vagina merely punctuates a long and almost unbearable sequence of absolute annihilation. Rape, rape, rape: in broad daylight and with the lights on, without the palatable suggestiveness of off-screen space. If the male strategy has always been to "give the thing another name, embellish the act, beat around the bush," Despentes' female and feminist response was, despite the risks, to shatter the historically mobilized silencing apparatuses used by both victims and perpetrators, and to dot the fucking t's. The explicit, expanded, and detailed representation of a presumably unnamable rite cannot be more immoral than averting one's gaze from the rite itself. Rape, rape, rape: the gears of this technology that produces broken subjectivities, that subjugates and continues to subjugate us, are working systematically and at full steam. Let's deal with it.

Furthermore, it is precisely the hyper-transparency of this seminal and metonymic scene that conjures an ethical stance. We can speak of the political nature of an anti-realist-porn: this mise-en-scène, so absurd and singular, could not have been constituted without consent. The helplessness of the characters is inversely proportional to the concrete mastery of experienced actresses. Between anguish and aversion, we know that these women, paradoxically, are safe. This ambiguity also accompanies the figurations of the murders later committed by Nadine and Manu, with their (consciously) theatrical and self-ironic excesses that thicken critical distances. The metallic, acidic, strident soundtrack amplifies the artificiality of the homicidal choreography. One cannot take an exploded but whole so seriously.

The supposed amateurishness of the camera, in turn, is a bet on the love of disorder. Critics speak of an inability in the composition of the shots, but there is nothing fortuitous in the establishment of chaos. From the outset, the cheap apparatus of video always opened loopholes for unruly discourses. A project like Baise-moi wouldn't hack artistic circuits in other ways. And it does, in fact, demonstrate a structural lucidity. The film follows the same configuration as the book, erecting the parallel and mirrored narratives of Nadine and Manu to their point of inflection and fusion – a volcanic alchemy that shakes and moves intra- and extra-filmic spaces, implicating the filming pair of women in the rhythm of the life and death actions and impulses of the pair of women being filmed. Nadine and Manu dance together to intertwine and seal horizons and bodies, flirting all the time with the invisible presence of Virginie and Coralie, contaminated by the flows of expression of pleasure.

Furthermore, there are refinements in the editing. Not only in exercises like the one where a kitchen knife advertisement, which slices a thin sausage, is sarcastically and premonitorily interspersed with the oral sex performed by Nadine on duty, but also in those that play with our dynamics of (dis)identification. Initially, we align perspectives with the rebellious girls: during this same program, for example, the subjective camera adopts the point of view of the prostitute played by Bach, who, hanging on the edge of the bed, sees the television images, alternately arranged on the screen, upside down. Every now and then, there is a glimpse of seductive generosity. But the filmmakers also shift us to the center of Manu and Nadine's merciless aim. By pointing the gun at the camera, they break pre-established pacts and transform us into their prey. Either way, the oscillating contradiction prevails between the complacent bonds and the fatal antagonism that we have forged, very loosely, with these bad girls, who spare no one.

And, once again, it is in this contradiction that Baise-moi circumvents its apparent immorality. In the game of approaches and distances, of inconstant reflections in broken mirrors, we never fully accept the killing carried out by Manu and Nadine, nor can we condemn them for their festive rage. After all, we are not talking about a hatred ignited by a particular episode – which, in itself, would already be grounds for outrage – but about an anger anarchically directed at a world that allows rape to be possible – and worse, necessary. Unrestricted sympathy would tame the savoir-faire of those who do not seek to conform to our failed parameters of sociability.

Therefore, Baise-moi is not, exactly, a rape revenge film . The protagonists are not simply seeking revenge for the aggression inflicted. They are the wild representation of femininity that rape failed to produce. “It was the rape project that remade me a woman, someone essentially vulnerable,” writes Despentes, who then imagines what would happen if this project, one day, perhaps, failed. Massacres, maybe, but also the revolution of an umbilical passion, like that of Manu and Nadine, the inexorable proof of “all those noble theories about soulmates” that “seemed so suspicious” (Despentes, 1999).

Baise-moi is a breakdown in the system and in cinema. It's a descent into hell, as Teresa de Lauretis suggested when reflecting on a crop of works by female filmmakers that emerged from the 1990s onwards, in which the heat of (homo)affectivity, the coldness of homicides, and the desires for (self-)destruction are articulated erotically and dangerously. De Lauretis says she doesn't know if " these films will serve as a warning or stimulus to the feminism to come," if they will lead us, like a ricocheting bullet, to repression in the realm of family and good morals, or if they could induce a self-analysis that "confronts the death that is within us. In all of us, old and young, lesbians and heterosexuals." The response of Manu and Nadine, the soerus-lovers-comrades, to the material reality that surrounds them may be perverse, but they halt an “ancestral undertaking,” as Despentes refers to it, that teaches women not to defend themselves or to direct punishments against themselves, so that we may never enjoy life in peace. Baise-moi is gasoline on the witches' bonfire, it is shock therapy in the electric chair, it is poison and cure. In its moderate dose of seventy-seven minutes, I risk devouring it like a powerful anesthetic against numb sensitivities. We are alive. And “invincible, even without any chance” (Despentes, 1999).

References

DE LAURETIS, Teresa. A descent into hell. Labrys Magazine , no. 3, 2003. Available at: < https://www.labrys.net.br/labrys3/web/bras/delauretis1.htm >. Accessed on September 20, 2024.

DESPENTES, Virginie. Baise-moi. New York: Grasset & Faquelle, 1999.

DESPENTES, Virginie. King Kong Theory . São Paulo: n-1 editions, 2016.

PRECIADO, Paul B. Countersexual Manifesto . São Paulo: n-1 editions, 2017.

This text was originally published on the Sara y Rosa website .