An angry, abrasive, relentless provocation brimming with graphic hardcore sex scenes and grisly point-blank shootings, Baise-moi boasts what could charitably be called a punk sensibility, with each new scene aimed like a fresh gob of spit at the establishment. Crudely directed on digital video by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi—a radical young novelist and a porn star, respectively—Baise-moi is an aesthetic black hole, negating, among other things, the distinction between pornography and art. (French authorities, apparently stymied by the challenge of finding anything of artistic merit in the film, banned it in its home country.) Post-modern, post-feminist, and post-good, the story lifts its basic premise from Thelma & Louise and pushes its female-empowerment tropes to calculatedly shocking new extremes. Out to prove that women are just as capable of being violent, sexually transgressive psychopaths as men (a hollow triumph if there ever was one), Despentes and Thi subvert the usual sex-and-guns fetishism by emphasizing female gratification over male. Real-life adult-film veterans Raffaëla Anderson and Karen Bach star as despairing sex professionals who meet by happenstance and decide to channel their aggression by taking "revenge on the world." Anderson, a porn actress with a clinical view of sex, has just survived a gang rape, but is left oddly unaffected by the experience. After she kills her boyfriend and steals his money, Anderson runs into Bach, a prostitute and smut-hound who recognizes the actress from her work. Also on the lam for assaulting her uptight roommate, Bach sees a kindred spirit in Anderson, and the two hit the road together, shooting and fucking people indiscriminately. In many ways, Baise-moi resembles Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45, a clever and audacious exploitation film about a mute seamstress who is raped twice in one night and takes revenge by gunning down lecherous males. The key difference between the two, outside of Ferrara's more substantial gifts as a director, is that the violent fantasy of Ms. 45 carries a coherent and provocative metaphor about women losing their voice in a male-dominated world. When the women "speak" through violence in Baise-moi, their targets are random and their rage misdirected, burying any substantial ideas in anarchy and chic nihilism. Even at a slender 77 minutes, the film's dreary succession of hardcore and splatter scenes becomes a tired and predictable formula in need of its own subversion.