Abstract
Baise-Moi(Despentes and Trinh Thi, 2000) is the story of two women who, marginalized by society, go on a destructive rampage where they ‘fuck’ and kill men. This study will discuss the anxieties the film has unearthed in relation to the alternative depiction of culturally accepted sexual roles and legitimate applications of violent acts, through its subversion of the generic expectations of pornography. Furthermore, it will be argued that the film, despite being progressive in form, challenging classical narrative structures and playing with generic tropes, is inherently a pessimistic film, because of its conservative ending that reaffirms the status quo.
Highlights
At the turn of the 21st century, an interesting movement started to take shape in contemporary French cinema1
Films categorized under the New French Extremity include scenes in which a toothbrush is being dipped into a toilet full of feces, a 13-year-old girl being deflowered, and a woman eating out the flesh from her arm
Looking at examples of films that have been classified under the New French Extremity, it can be seen that they vary thematically
Summary
At the turn of the 21st century, an interesting movement started to take shape in contemporary French cinema. Quandt argues that the use of “forbidden images, hackneyed from their overuse in the porn industry” (2004: 127) are used in order to reconsider the reality in which we live in and that these images are authentic; full penetration is shown to the audiences, not masked by Hollywoodlike gloss and editing, but rather a much more crude, and natural looking approach to it, which makes these films more realistic in terms of what they are portraying. In a way, it seems that these directors are confronting their audiences with uncomfortable truths to see how many taboos they can break and, primarily, to provoke morality and its absolutes. They have to be woken up...” (Quandt 2004: 130) There is clearly the need to change traditional notions of spectatorship in Dumont’s words and the more extreme the depiction, the more jolted spectators are no doubt
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