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Violence, not sex, turns French
Minister off film
The
French may have lost all inhibitions about sex on the
silver screen, but an orgy of raw violence in films
has got the country’s culture minister deeply worried.
France’s artists and chic left wing have been howling
“censorship!” after Screw Me — 76 low-budget
minutes of hardcore sex and murder — was effectively
banned this month and removed from cinemas around the
country. Its scenes of two angry young women driving
around France, killing men after pick-up sex, or suffering
violent rapes, were a statement about society’s
violence against women, they argued.
The fact it was branded pornographic after complaints
by a far-right group and a Catholic family association,
added fuel to the fire, prompting defenders to issue
dire warnings about a return to Puritanism in France.
But
much of the heat generated by the movie, entitled Baise
moi in French and sometimes called Rape Me in English,
misses the worrying trend that its in-your-face scenes
highlight, according to Culture Minister Catherine Tasca.
“There are sex scenes that are totally crude, but
that doesn’t shock many people these days,”
she said, “But almost every sex act ends with the
partner getting murdered. That’s no way to live!”
Some
reviewers thought it was no way to make interesting
movies, either. The U.S. entertainment daily Variety
dismissed Screw Me as “a half-baked, punk-inflected
porn odyssey masquerading as a movie worth seeing and
talking about.”
Acting
on complaints from the two “pro-family” groups,
France’s highest administrative court viewed the
film, and reversed the Culture Ministry’s original
decision to release the film for viewers who are 16
and over. By re-rating it as an X film, the State Council
effectively banned Screw Me from public showing in France
after only a few days and consigned it, in Tasca’s
words, to “economic burial.”
Under
French law, X-rated films can only be shown in “adult
cinemas.” But this once-thriving business has disappeared
in the past decade, now that home videos and the Internet
give French viewers all the hardcore pornography they
want. Torn between her opposition to censorship and
the state’s duty to protect minors, Tasca —
a 58-year-old Socialist, long active in cultural politics
— has decided to add a new category to the system
of ‘visas’ all films need to be shown in France.
The ‘visa’ system currently classifies films
for 13 and above, 16 and above, or X, leaving no option
of banning a film for all minors. Tasca plans to add
a new category for viewers who are 18 and over, meaning
the film could be back in the cinemas in a few months.
“I have real reservations about these violent images,”
Tasca said, noting that she sometimes heard the argument
that reality was actually worse than the violence seen
on the screen, “It’s one thing to see mass
graves in Kosovo on the evening news. It’s terrible,
but that’s the reality of our planet. It’s
another thing to see it in fiction with heroes that
some people look up to.”
The
film’s co-director Virginie Despentes, who wrote
the book the movie is based on, rejected the idea of
any limits. “We’re allowed to be radical or
outraged when we make films, it’s a question of
freedom of expression,” she told the daily Le Monde,
“As an author, I can’t accept any censorship
except that which I impose myself.”
If
the insatiably curious in France cannot wait for Screw
Me to re-appear, they can drive across the border to
Belgium, where it has been released. Belgium has only
two film categories — “children admitted”
and “children not admitted” — with 16
being the pivotal age.
Britain
and about a dozen other countries are reportedly also
interested in distribution rights for the film.
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