You can make a movie about cinephilia, make a movie that’s a labor of love, make a movie that lovingly presents its subject matter, make a movie that’s supposed to narrativize the process of falling in love, but romantic love is outside of cinematic representation; it only exists in the collapsed space of the cut that joins the look of lover to that of the beloved. That’s part of why attempts at its visual representation are so highly codified and banal, to the point of becoming product trademarks: hearts, roses, diamonds, the wedding couple. And all love stories are pedantic, torpid reiterations of the limited positions in desire’s fluid economy made available by the hegemonic ideology nearest you. I need only refer the reader to Brokeback Mountain for illustration. It’s more cinematic to make a movie about fucking. Problem is , it’s not so easy to get that movie into theaters.

Censorships of various types worked internationally through the mid-20 th century to suppress sex-act content in commercial cinema. The injunction against sexual intercourse did not invariably excise it from the screen. In Hollywood, the sex act was evoked by a shot of a couple kissing, followed by a fade to black. This non-image of sex still had duration, and thereby both significance and signification, according to the mechanics of cinematic creation of meaning. The missing visual content of the sex act thus represented doesn’t just disappear. Like all repressed thoughts, it manages to sneak its way into other content via metonymic shape-shifting.

Film censorship bifurcates the potentially polymorphous and complex act of fucking into two gendered representational realms. The part of fucking that promises to complete the self through union with an other fetishizes the object of desire; in films made within heterosexual patriarchy (that is, the world), this object is the body of woman, inscribed by an insistent, controlling, and ultimately commodifying male gaze. Part of fucking promises to annihilate the self through union with an other; as patriarchy is also homosocial, films render this annihilation as male-on-male violence. The ossified codes of cinematic representation, the mainstream’s resistance to experimentation, are in part the material result of the work cinema has had to do to resist the temptations of the flesh. Censorship restrictions began to loosen in the 1960s and nowadays you’d have to be blind not to recognize the pornographization of industrial culture tout court, not just in the US; but for all the sexually explicit imagery and gesture that pervades the mediascape, mainstream art and entertainment films still resist hardcore images of fucking in favor of “love stories.”

Baise-moi (Fuck Me) is one of several recent movies made in France that dare to feature explicit shots of penises penetrating vaginas. Leave it to the French, who have understood the full potential of film art since Louis Delluc theorized photogénie, and whose cinema has been associated with sex since Brigitte Bardot. Most of these “transgressive” films adamantly cleansed themselves of any association with pornography, and were greeted by critics with murmurs of respect for the director’s daring and sensitivity. Baise-moi refused to wash up after fucking. Shot on digital video in available light on location, co-directed by a porn actress and starring two more, Baise-moi has more in common with gritty films du quartier than with ennui-filled tracking shots through “design-forward” product showcases such as Catherine Breillat’s much-lauded Romance. Baise-moi comes in off the street to penetrate cinema in several ways, and cinema’s once again left à bout de souffle.

Baise-moi offers up a few sex ’n death-filled days in the lives of Nadine and Manu, who exist in conditions of numbing economic and psychic abjection at the beginning of the film. Connections between their different material circumstances are created through direct intercutting of scenes of their daily grinds, joined by sound bridges. They meet up with each other by chance/fate after each has killed, in a moment of passionate fury, the most intimate representative of her social oppression. Stealing the form of sociopathic-buddies-on-the-lam films, Baise-moi leaves the social territory of the quartier for the metaphorical and much-traveled cinematic space of “the road,” where the protagonists decide to drink and fuck as much as they can. “The more you fuck, the less you think, and the better you sleep.”

The film’s directors say that you can’t masturbate to it, so it isn’t porn. While I could readily argue this point, let’s just say that authorial intent has a limited function in creating the meaning of a film. What makes the film not porn is that it is neither produced nor distributed as porn; its sex scenes can’t carry the film, but the film is meaningless without them. The film’s intervention into mainstream cinema is not at the level of content, where female protagonists have satisfying sex on their own terms and kill lots of people. It’s at the structural level, where it attempts to rejoin fetishized images of women’s bodies with the exhilarating, self-annihilating potential of physical violence. What results from this Frankensteinian operation is not pretty, but it sure is an aesthetic.

Some people gripe that the film is heterosexist, even homophobic, that it shies away from fully realizing Nadine and Manu’s relationship with a sex scene. These viewers were clearly left high and dry by that scene of the two women dancing with each other in their fetish underwear. Sigh. But Baise-moi’s effort to rejoin the two historically gendered representational realms created by censorship of sexual acts in mainstream cinema necessitates that the sex acts shown on screen feature vaginas and penises. While cocks are necessary to the work of this film, there are no “money shots”: in the language of Baise-moi, ejaculate is only a noun.

Fucking is natural subject matter for the cinema, this visual medium that so effectively engages us in voyeurism and synesthesia. It was only a matter of time before hardcore sex tired of pornography and started to penetrate the love story. Such piercing of the veil of ideology is bound to feel like a violation. Hence the US translation of Baise-moi: Rape Me .