The film has been written and directed by Virginie Despentes, based on her novel; she enlisted Coralie Trin Thi, a porno actress, as her codirector (whether to help with the visual strategy or because of her understanding of the mechanical requirements of onscreen sex, it is hard to say). The movie’s central characters, Manu and Nadine, are played by Raffaela Anderson and Karen Bach, who act in hardcore films, and some of the men are also from the porno industry. This is, in fact, the kind of film the director in Boogie Nights wanted to make—“porn, but artistic”—although he would have questioned the box office appeal of the praying mantis approach to sex, in which the male is killed immediately after copulation.
As it happens, I saw a Japanese-American coproduction named Brother not long after seeing Baise-Moi. It was written and directed by Takeshi Kitano, who starred under his acting name, Beat Takeshi. Kitano under any name is the Japanese master of lean, violent, heartless action pictures, and in this one the plot is punctuated every five minutes or so by a bloodbath in which enemies are shot dead. Many, many enemies. We’re talking dozens. The killings are separated in Brother by about the same length of time as those in Baise-Moi, or the sex acts in a porno film. Obviously all three kinds of film are providing payoffs by the clock. Would Brother be as depressing as Baise-Moi if all the victims had sex before they were gunned down? I don’t know, but I’m sure Baise-Moi would be perfectly acceptable if the women simply killed men, and no sex was involved. At some level it seems so … cruel … to shoot a man at his moment of success.
A case can be made that Baise-Moi wants to attack sexism in the movies at the same time it raises the stakes. I’m not interested in making that argument. Manu and Nadine are man haters and clinically insane, and not every man is to blame for their unhappiness—no, not even if he sleeps with them. An equally controversial new American movie named Bully is also about stupid, senseless murder, but it has the wit to know what it thinks about its characters. Baise-Moi is more of a bluff. The directors know their film is so extreme that most will be repelled, but some will devise intellectual defenses and interpretations for it, saving them the trouble of making it clear what they want to say. I can’t buy it. Ernest Hemingway, who was no doubt a sexist pig, said it is moral if you feel good after it, and immoral if you feel bad after it. Manu and Nadine do not feel bad, and that is immoral.
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
(DIRECTED BY WYCH KAOSAYANANDA; STARRING ANTONIO BANDERAS, LUCY LIU; 2002)
There is nothing wrong with the title Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever that renaming it Ballistic would not have solved. Strange that they would choose such an ungainly title when, in fact, the movie is not about Ecks versus Sever but about Ecks and Sever working together against a common enemy—although Ecks, Sever, and the audience take a long time to figure that out.
The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions, light on continuity, sanity, and coherence. So short is its memory span that although Sever kills, I dunno, maybe forty Vancouver police officers in an opening battle, by the end, when someone says, “She’s a killer,” Ecks replies, “She’s a mother.”
The movie stars Lucy Liu as Sever, a former agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which according to www.dia.mil/ is a branch of the U.S. government. Antonio Banderas is Ecks, a former ace FBI agent who is coaxed back into service. Sever has lost her child in an attack and Ecks believes he has lost his wife, so they have something in common, you see, even though …
But I’ll not reveal that plot secret and will instead discuss the curious fact that both of these U.S. agencies wage what amounts to warfare in Vancouver, which is actually in a nation named Canada that has agencies and bureaus of its own and takes a dim view of machine guns, rocket launchers, plastic explosives, and the other weapons the American agents and their enemies use to litter the streets of the city with the dead.
Both Sever and Ecks, once they discover this, have the same enemy in common: Gant (Gregg Henry), a DIA agent who is married to Talisa Sota and raising her child, although Sever kidnaps the child, who is in fact … but never mind, I want to discuss Gant’s secret weapon. He has obtained a miniaturized robot so small it can float in the bloodstream and cause strokes and heart attacks.
At one point in the movie a man who will remain nameless is injected with one of these devices by a dart gun, and it kills him. All very well, but consider for a moment the problem of cost overruns in these times of economic uncertainty. A miniaturized assassination robot small enough to slip through the bloodstream would cost how much? Millions? And it is delivered by dart? How’s this for an idea: Use a poison dart and spend the surplus on school lunches.
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is an ungainly mess, submerged in mayhem, occasionally surfacing for clichés. When the FBI goes looking for Ecks, for example, they find him sitting morosely on a bar stool, drinking and smoking. That is, of course, where sad former agents always are found, but the strange thing is, after years of drinking he is still in great shape, has all his karate moves, and goes directly into violent action without even a tiny tremor of DTs.
The movie ends in a stock movie location I thought had been retired: a steam and flame factory where the combatants stalk each other on catwalks and from behind steel pillars, while the otherwise deserted factory supplies vast quantities of flame and steam. Vancouver itself, for that matter, is mostly deserted, and no wonder, if word has gotten around that two U.S. agencies and a freelance killer are holding war games. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever was directed by Wych Kaosayananda of Thailand, whose pseudonym, you may not be surprised to learn, is Kaos.
Basic
(DIRECTED BY JOHN MCTIERNAN; STARRING JOHN TRAVOLTA, SAMUEL L. JACKSON; 2003)
I embarked on Basic with optimism and goodwill, confident that a military thriller starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, and directed by John McTiernan (Die Hard), might be entertaining action and maybe more. As the plot unfolded, and unfolded, and unfolded, and unfolded, I leaned forward earnestly in my seat, trying to remember where we had been and what we had learned.
Reader, I gave it my best shot. But with a sinking heart I realized that my efforts were not going to be enough, because this was not a film that could be understood. With style and energy from the actors, with every sign of self-confidence from the director, with pictures that were in focus and dialogue that you could hear, the movie descended into a morass of narrative quicksand. By the end, I wanted to do cruel and vicious things to the screenplay.
There’s a genre that we could call the Jerk-Around Movie, because what it does is jerk you around. It sets up a situation and then does a bait and switch. You never know which walnut the truth is under. You invest your trust and are betrayed.
I don’t mind being jerked around if it’s done well, as in Memento. I felt The Usual Suspects was a long ride for a short day at the beach, but at least as I traced back through it, I could see how it held together. But as nearly as I can tell, Basic exists with no respect for objective reality. It is all smoke and no mirrors. If I were to see it again and again, I might be able to extract an underlying logic from it, but the problem is, when a movie’s not worth seeing twice, it had better get the job done the first time through.