(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 19 April 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Rachel Holmes, an unusually graphic combination of sex and violence. Does it make the case for the degree of explicitness?

RACHEL HOLMES:
I absolutely loved this. I went to see the film in a foul mood and came out finding it utterly cathartic.

It's one of the most feminist movies I have seen in a long time. Yes, it's a fantasy and cartoon and needs to be taken in that regard.

MARK LAWSON:
But feminism involving murdering men?

RACHEL HOLMES:
Yes, but that's not the key point. The key point is that the thing this film repudiates from the beginning is it absolutely refuses throughout itself to gratify the male gaze and to gratify the male audience.

All those conventions and cliches, unlike the Pornographer, which is utterly cliched, you know that this is an original film.

At the centre of this conversation is the relationship between these two women. They kill like men.

There is nothing in this film that we haven't already seen in a Tarantino or Scorcese.

What there is in this film is while women kill like men, they talk about it like women. After the first shoot'em-up scene and they have committed this murder, doing it in a cool, if you like masculine way, they have a conversation about it.

MARK LAWSON:
The sex, which they claim is very largely real, is much more explicit than anything in Tarantino and other films of this type though isn't it?

RACHEL HOLMES:
No, I don't think so. You are looking at it from a different perspective, the woman's perspective and they are not interested in the two men in the room, but in each other.

MARK LAWSON:
Both of these films, Pornographer and Baise-Moi, are using the same strategy.

They are explicit but they are both saying there is a moral here. In this case, it's to do with feminism. Did that convince you?

TOM PAULIN:
First of all, I thought this is absolutely awful, dreadful, grotesque, all these sex scenes and all the violence.

Then, on reflection, I thought, "Isn't this a film which is proposing this feminist idea that if you take feminism as simply about empowering the individual women, you don't address questions of class and race and culture".

So if you just make it pure individualism, you end up with a completely barren concept, and it is the exploration of barrenness.

What it's saying is feminism begins with the terrible cruelty of the male, the awful rape at the beginning, and then to create itself goes off down the same male individualistic track and end up just back to square one.

MARK LAWSON:
Rosie Boycott, I first saw this in a public screening in America.

There were two or three dirty old men staring at the screen and everybody else was looking at the wall to show we were liberal and didn't want to be part of it. Were you looking at it straight in the eyes?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
Yes, but I found it a shocking, horrid film. I find it really offensive that someone should say that is made in the name of feminism and that in some way is advancing the cause of women to say we can kill like men.

The writer as well has said this is a feminist film, saying something about the power of women. As a feminist all my life, if that's where we have got to, it's shameful. It was triply exploitative.

If a man had made such a film about women, we would have been up in arms.

There is an extraordinary double jeopardy. Because it's made by women we are somehow meant to say it's fine, because they are girls doing the killing, and after all this time girls have been repressed and they can go round shooting people. They even shoot a woman. Please don't let it become a cult.

MARK LAWSON:
But Rachel saw it as a feminist film, though?

RACHEL HOLMES:
Yes. If we are mesmerised by the sex, we are missing significant points around it.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
The sex is so brutal and horrible.

RACHEL HOLMES:
The two actresses that have been chosen, the commentary is that they are porn stars. These women are both North African, one half- Algerian, one half Moroccan.

These are two women on the margins of society, on the street, culturally and politically marginalised. They are North Africans. They are avenging themselves against these white European men.

Yes, OK, and they kill women as well. I just think that, also, we are so used to being uncritical of what we would see in a Tarantino or any thriller, and yet here they talk about it with great humour.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
What points do you think they are trying to say?

RACHEL HOLMES:
Their first murder, they sit down, and they have done the killing like boys thing. Then the one says to the other, "How did you feel when you did that?" And the other said, "At first I felt like this, and then like this."

I stepped back and thought when I am watching most Hollywood genre shoot'em-up movie, you don't get that type of conversation. It's very girly in that way.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
It's putting the girliness on to this violence which makes it even more horrible. It's as if someone has really wanted to shock and use these things.

The fact is nobody had seen this film until the controversy started, and now people are going because of the controversy. It's a terrible waste, and makes me want to throw up.

RACHEL HOLMES:
I think that, if you take it at the level of cartoon and fantasy, and in that way, that it is very enjoyable and cathartic.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
Enjoyable?!

MARK LAWSON:
Probably more of a woman's night out for at least some.