When sex and violence are acceptable

I hate violence in films. When characters thump each other on television I close my eyes and ask my family to tell me when it's over. I made it through Pulp Fiction because it was fast and funny. I stayed away from Reservoir Dogs and I decided I didn't need to see Saving Private Ryan. When I'm told that the latest Mel Gibson film, We Were Soldiers, is one gory death after another, I strike it off my list. And I hate sex and violence even more when it's pretentious, which is why I've never seen Blue Velvet and felt that reading the reviews of The Piano Teacher was enough. In short, when there's blood on screen, just tell me when it's safe to look again.

I don't like porn either, not the hard-core kind I've had to see as a journalist, the kind with swollen body parts, lots of jerking and lots of grunting. Nor do I like the kind of soft porn you see on Japanese hotel TV channels where very tiny, childlike girls whimper their way through impersonal, mechanical sex with large men. Porn is easy sex devoid of emotion or social context, unlike real life. It's exploitative. There's no story, no human contact, and it raises ludicrous expectations in those daft enough to believe that there's a world where men and women will start grimly shagging each other at the popping of a button.

So my take on Baise-Moi, the latest cause celebre in France, ought to be predictable. Baise-Moi will cause just as much of a stir here in England when it opens, with an 18 certificate, in May. It's an excessively violent and shamelessly pornographic film about two girls from France's mixedrace underclass who are raped and go on a murderous spree of casual sex and even more casual killing.

I didn't want to see it. But I was asked to see it and, after an hour and a half of watching very graphic sex and so many exploding heads that I lost the body count, I found myself thinking, yes, I can see why they did that. It's horrible and it's shocking but it has a logic. When a director sets up a world and characters that you believe in, however bleak, then, in that context, the unacceptable becomes, not palatable, but understandable. What I was left with, hours later, was not so much the images of sex and violence but a simmering residue of the anger that drove the story.

It's the rage in Baise-Moi that, for me, justifies the raw sex and the violence. It's what gives it its edge of authenticity. It's a rage which grows from the twilight world of the public housing projects where France's immigrants subsist on dole and drugs. The men hang out in pool halls and street corners. The women hang out waiting for the men, who routinely insult and abuse them. The difference in this view of life from the lowest level is that it is seen through the eyes of the women.

Two females in partnership, writer-director Virginie Despentes and writer Coralie Trinh Thi, have worked with two female actresses, Raffaela Anderson and Karen Lancaume, both with pornmovie backgrounds, to give a voice to the victims of victims, the girls who are used and brutalised by men of the underclass.

Other films have shown violence and rape but they haven't elicited the same empathy, and I wonder if that is because most of them have been made by men. Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, which was withdrawn because of the outcry over its violence, was ritualised and choreographed it. It wasn't dirty, but Baise-Moi is. The Accused, a Hollywood film about a girl with a bad reputation who was, nevertheless, a victim of gang rape, didn't have half the crude power that Baise-Moi gets from showing a rape that looks as though it's caught on security cameras and pulls no punches on pain, abuse, degradation and the bitter fury and humiliation felt by the victims. This is a girl's view of rape, reeking with shame, devoid of pleasure or titillation. And it couldn't have its corrosive effect if the director hadn't been so graphic.

The more I think about it, what I find truly pornographic, truly unacceptable, is sex and violence without emotion. The emotion doesn't have to be positive but it must be felt. Sex as an expression of love is uplifting, and romance is fine, but we can learn a lot about the human condition from seeing stories which unite sex with shame, sex with awkwardness, sex with inexperience, sex with power or grief.

The two girl protagonists in Baise-Moi are porn stars. They had to be to participate in the film's real sex, but for the first time the sex is driven by a narrative so it has a purpose beyond titillation. Its compulsive, unaffected-quality is in keeping with the emotional brutality of the social background from which they come. I believed in it and I believed in them.

Why am I arguing for a level of crudeness and violence in this film that I've found unacceptable in a dozen others? Maybe it's because, with a woman writer and director and a woman producer, I know that this film isn't simply voyeuristic. When a male director is putting a female star through all kinds of humiliations it can't help leaving a nasty taste - think of Susan George being raped in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, think of Emily Watson as the victim of sadism in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, a very disturbing arthouse movie which repelled me and the girlfriend I saw it with, despite warm reviews.

Sex and violence seem to form part of male fantasies to a level which they simply don't in women's minds, so when two women go to the lengths they have done in Baise-Moi you know it's because they have something they are burning to say. It's grim, it's disturbing, it's depressing and I wouldn't pay to go and see it, but, despite myself, I do respect what they have done.