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Point Of View! with Barb Sumner Burstyn
Baise Moi, Plain Smut and Violence? -
May 16 2002
Perverts and censors - they have more in common
than you think.
 For
the moral high-grounders among us the decisions to ban the movie
Baise Moi both in New Zealand and Australia must seem like a victory
for all that is good in the world.
Certainly Baise Moi is pornographic in many aspects.
There's real-time sex with nothing left to the imagination and
plenty of violence. But I'm wondering if the outrage and subsequent
success of the banning bid by the New Zealand Society for the
Promotion of Community Standards (SPCS) is because Baise Moi is
far more than a smutty, violent film? Sure there are a couple
of graphic rape scenes but pretty soon the victims become the
aggressors and the tables are turned.
Perhaps it's the table turning that has outraged the moral rightists
more than the sex? Because put up against a range of other violent,
sex laden films Baise Moi is no worse that many that are freely
available. Except that this time it's the women who seek revenge.
And the men that get their comeuppance.
Or perhaps our moral guardians just wanted the film banned to
protect us all from the twisted few who might find it titillating
and attempt to copy it's murderous premise “ but remind me “ when
exactly was the last time a woman went on a random homicidal rampage?
But don't think I'm promoting this movie. I'm not.
It made me sick. But it also made me think. And that is the
point of a film like Baise Moi and doubly the point of screening
it at a festival rather than as a general release. The whole purpose
of a festival, even one as often outlandish as Becks Incredible
Film Festival, is to screen challenging films, to make us think,
to shift our perspectives and to sometimes create that sense of
inner horror that causes us to redefine our approach and thought
on certain subjects. And Baise-Moi is one of those films.
It's exigent and repulsive, a brutal, savage and disturbing film.
It's not, as the promotional blurb would have us believe, a simple
tale of two girls staying alive in a world infested with raping
men. And the producers are being disingenuous when they state
the protagonists “ I refuse to call them heroines - are not bad
girls. They are. They're mean and shallow and vicious and murderous.
The film's PR goes on to insist we should all understand and
feel kinship toward the lead characters because they are beyond
judgment. But while the producers may believe the characters portrayed
are beyond judgment the film certainly isn't.
Mine and yours; if you could only get to see it. And that's the
point our moral guardians seem to have missed.
The very act of choosing to view or not view a movie of this
sort is the act of being adult. We hear constantly we are living
in a time of declining moral standards.
But groups like the SPCS reduce our opportunities to grow moral
muscles by taking the decisions for us. By default the banning
becomes the only critique and by definition casts the film in
a purely sexual light.
It's this very point that seems to elude those who would protect
the public from itself.
And by removing it from the restricted viewing of a festival
you remove the opportunity to assess, to critique, to lambaste
or support and we are all denied the opportunity to view this
segment of human potential gone severely askew. In the end the
message the banning sends is not that Baise Moi is a bad film
but that we, the potential audience are incapable of using personal
discretion.
That, having chosen to view a restricted screening plastered
with content warning notices, we are not savvy enough to come
away with a wider perspective and a deeper understanding of the
capacity for depravity that lurks in the human soul.
The High Court's interim decision to uphold SPCS complaint, reversing
the decision of the Film and Literature Board of Review is in
fact limiting all of us to the narrow worlds occupied by both
the SPCS and the film-makers themselves, shrinking our opportunity
to make personal moral decisions to the narrow paradigms that
both these groups occupy.
Personally I think the value of Baise Moi is in the personal
development that comes from confrontation, from being affected
and challenged, from being horrified and repulsed and from reconsidering
the consequences of our own roles and actions in society.
And what of the fear that Baise Moi might encourage that tiny
minority who may find sexual gratification in this and other film
festival fare - Surprisingly, the perverts with their narrow band
of understanding and their inability to see beyond the depictions
of sex and violence to the deeper story within have a lot in common
with the members of the Society for the Protection of Community
Standards.
Have your say on this column:
Barb Sumner Burstyn.
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn
April 2002.
P.O.V. with
Barbara Sumner Burstyn @
http://www.spectator.co.nz/POV
and now @ http://www.mensnewsdaily.com
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