Baise-Moi: Hard-core - and heavy going ...

Film critic PETER CALDER draws the curtains and risks watching the film that all the fuss is about.

New Zealand First MP Peter Brown, who describes himself as "unfortunate enough" to have seen Baise-Moi, concludes that it has "no artistic value" - a view I'm inclined to share.

He says it's "disgusting" too, although disgust, like beauty, resides rather in the eye of the beholder; I thought the revisionist, racist, bellicose drivel called Black Hawk Down was pretty sickening, but the top brass of the American military, who proudly attended its premiere, plainly disagreed.

It seems harder to conclude, as the good Mr Brown did, that Baise-Moi is degrading to women. The film (its title, incidentally, is an idiomatic, two-word invitation to have sex, the second word of which is "me") is a hard-core variant of Thelma and Louise.

It follows two lowlife Frenchwomen in a crosscountry odyssey of murderous mayhem and unprotected intercourse which is plainly not simulated (the women directors and the two main actresses are porn industry veterans).

Like most pornography - soft or hard core - it manages by its very excess to amaze and bore at the same time; it's titillating in the same way that Swiss chocolate would be delicious if you ate a couple of kilos at a sitting.

But, dimly visible through the blood and bodily fluids, one detects an attempt at a transgressive idea - that women are as capable of sexual predation and brutality as the men who are its usual on-screen perpetrators.

Anyone who thinks that the film succeeds in saying something interesting about that subject plainly doesn't get out to the movies enough.

Baise-Moi's characters are utterly devoid of charm or even discernible personality, and a scene towards the end where we watch one of them trying to convey an inner emotional struggle is almost hilariously inept.

But it has its cheeky moments. My favourite was a scene in a hotel room where the two women dance half-naked, plainly inviting the expectation of the lesbian encounter which is a standby of heterosex porn.

Nothing happens. That's thejoke.

In the end, though, the "sex equals death" concept, as old as art itself, is never elevated above tired cliche, and an early rape scene is too lovingly lingered over to allow the rest of the film to pretend to be a vengeful catharsis. It's a shabby, grubby piece of work in which the performers look as bored as I was.

It's for brighter minds than mine - Mr Brown's, perhaps - to decide whether it should be banned. But if he really wants to see something offensive, he should check out a sex scene in the forthcoming Monster's Ball. That film earned Halle Berry a best actress Oscar - and it made me feel pretty queasy.

Visitor Q, the other film which has attracted the ire of the righteous, is a very different proposition. Shot on digital video, and part of a long tradition of Japanese cult trash, it's a deadpan, ultra-black comedy which is a very clever satire of that country's traditional notion of family and is ultimately more conservative than revolutionary (it coyly mists out the actors' genitals).

Its component parts (it includes domestic violence, drug use, incest, masochism, necrophilia and school bullying) may make it sound horrendous, but a decontextualised list of the Bible's events would give a bad impression of that book too.

It's not really to my taste - I didn't miss a lot watching most of it on fast forward - but neither is most of the Incredible Film Festival. Leave the damn thing alone, I say. We're big enough to handle it.