Scandale! UK Release Of Baise-Moi On 3 May.

When former punk and massage-parlour hostess Virginie Despentes wrote Baise-Moi, her story of sisters on a sex-and-murder spree, she was lionised by literary France. But that was before she teamed up with an ex-porn star to make the film version - complete with hardcore sex

When your film is called Fuck Me you can expect a strong reaction, especially if you are a woman. Should it also feature two female porn stars exercising their art in vivid close-up, and depict them as unrepentant mass murderers, it's odds-on moralists will foam at the mouth. Yet despite her vilification by the French press, first-time director Virginie Despentes is undaunted by the prospect of similar treatment here. In fact she relishes the predictable howls of outrage that will surely accompany the UK release of Baise-Moi on 3 May.

'If that's what happens, fine,' she says, puffing on her roll-up as we wait for her co-director, ex-porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi. 'It doesn't bother me personally. The only problem is that people will be frightened to see the film, even though for audiences used to De Palma, Scorsese and Tarrantino, it's not outrageous. True, it's quite hard, but not unwatchable. But some people are determined to demonise it. You know, I think it may take five or six years before people can watch Baise-Moi and judge it on its merits.'

The merits or otherwise of Baise-Moi have already been hotly debated in France, where it was banned by the Conseil d'Etat, the French state council. Overnight, the film version of Despentes's bestselling debut novel became the most widely debated French cultural artefact for decades, with some dismissing it as exploitative pseudo-pornography, while others hailed a violent art movie in the tradition of Reservoir Dogs.

One critic praised it as a 'kind of Thelma & Louise on crack' - despite the absence of crack in a storyline that nonetheless involves substantial amounts of cocaine, alcohol and cannabis. However, most reactions were negative. French daily Le Monde branded it a 'sick film'; while upmarket weekly Le Nouvel Observateur said it 'throws sex in your face to sell blood and gore'. When screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2000, some audience members walked out in disgust.

Yet Time magazine included Baise-Moi in its list of 2000's top-ten films, declaring that 'Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's festival sensation is stark, serious and original. And as one of the amoral avengers, Raffaela Anderson has true star quality - part seraph, all slut.'

Despite its much-trumpeted sex scenes, though, Baise-Moi contains little of interest for would-be voyeurs. True, the two principal actresses, Karen Bach (Nadine) and Raffaela Anderson (Manu) learnt their trade in the porn business, and had no qualms about the hardcore sex required by the script. But despite close-ups of fellatio, ejaculation, sodomy and straightforward heterosexual coupling, the wobbling flesh is all too tragically human, serving only to underline the characters' vulnerability, and the consequences of their own desires. Likewise, rare moments of calm, which suggest a deep bond between the heroines, are shattered by the sudden and exponential violence.

The film's grainy, pseudo-documentary texture makes it even more provocative and disquieting. The combination of graphic sex scenes and Manga-style violence, even in a post-Tarantino world, still has the power to shock. The film's heroines shoot to kill, no questions asked. But lurking under the harsh surface is a serious film with a bleak, sardonic sense of humour. 'You'd think anything was allowed,' says Nadine at one point, surprised at her own bloodlust.

A nervy, intellectual, but girlish thirtysome thing, Despentes speaks softly, in sudden bursts, and smokes incessantly, rolling one narrow cigarette after another. Behind Lennon-style glasses, her deep blue eyes are lined by dark shadows. She wears beatnik black: V-neck sweater, jeans, trainers. Home is a triangular, one-bedroom apartment in Château Rouge, a low-rent area favoured by African immigrants. It is Saturday lunchtime, the market four floors below is hectic and noisy and the drawn curtains make the room suitably dingy. She bought this flat after her debut novel became a bestseller in the mid-90s, and has lived here ever since. When I suggest she can now afford a calmer, more salubrious area - the chic Latin Quarter, perhaps - she simply changes the subject.

Despentes quit college aged 17, said goodbye to her parents, who worked at the local post office in Nancy, in north-eastern France, and drifted to the affluent but socially divided southern city of Lyon. There, she shut herself away and read - 'mainly politics, Surrealism and novels' - and studied film-noir videos. Occasionally she jumped the train to follow local punk group Les Berurier Noir. This band, and the loose underground network associated with it, became an important reference point in her political development. 'The punks helped me to develop a writing style free of hang-ups and complexes,' she says. 'My writing is really just rap and punk applied in a literary form.'

In Lyon, she grew streetwise and increasingly more daring, learning about French society's seedier aspects through the Minitel system, a proto-internet network that serves as a noticeboard for anonymous sexual encounters. Eventually, she drifted into the world of prostitution, working at massage parlours and peepshows. Shortly afterwards she became a rap singer, and reviewed local gigs for the music press.

In 1992, she returned to her parents' place to write Baise-Moi in three weeks on her father's computer. Having been rejected by every major publishing house, the manuscript was eventually accepted by niche publishers Florent-Massot. Meanwhile, proof copies circulating among her punk cohorts and their extended 'family' generated excellent word of mouth, alerting the student fraternity and tipping off journalists, who scrabbled to present Despentes as the underground voice of les marginalisés . By the time it was published, 50,000 copies of Baise-Moi had been pre-sold and the text translated into 10 languages.

This was followed by a collection of equally caustic short stories, Mordre au Travers (Bite Through), which cemented her reputation. Two years later, by now established as a freelance rock critic, she published Les Chiennes Savantes (Highbrow Bitches) - a story of prostitutes working in the peepshows of Lyon. In 1998, upmarket publishing house Grasset lured her away from Massot to publish Les Jolies Choses (Pretty Things), a story of twin sisters with totally different lives, written in an altogether less 'trash' style than her previous work. It won the Prix de Flore, the literary prize offered annually by the famous literary cafe on the Boulevard St Germain. And so Virginie Despentes - former punk, one-time beggar, massage-parlour hostess, rock journalist and rapper - was finally drawn to the bosom of France's literary industry.

Today, she is regarded as the pioneer of a new genre of feminist literature which has seized the sexual act as its own territory. Unlike most of the drivel published in Britain under the tag of 'chick lit', its French counterpart is characterised by violence and an aggressive political agenda - it aims to tear down the pretence of gender equality and rekindle the national debate on male violence.

Even more shocking than Despentes's depictions of twisted male rage are her profoundly disturbing images of female self-hatred. She does not flinch from showing how women - almost willingly - allow themselves to be debased, bought, sold and maltreated.

This, more than anything, is what outrages her critics on both the left and the right. The row over Baise-Moi, she says, merely underlines the hypocrisy that allows violent and pornographic imagery to be distributed via TV, video, magazines or internet - but balks at the idea of it being introduced into mainstream cinema. The fact that Baise-Moi was briefly pulled from French cinemas only proves this point, she claims. And yes, she was shocked at the French state's readiness to ban her film. 'After all, my vision is close to that of many women,' she claims, tugging her long, brown curls.

Coralie Trinh Thi arrives to bolster this argument. Slim, beautiful and charismatic, with deathly pale skin and silky jet hair, she, too, is dressed all in black, but sporting a look more goth than beat: ankle-length velvet dress and suede boots, a large silver crucifix and numerous silver rings. She and Despentes were introduced by a record label executive who wanted the novelist to write lyrics for Trinh Thi, whom he hoped to launch as a rock star.

A native Parisian of Vietnamese descent, Trinh Thi says she gave up literature studies to become a porn star at the age of 18, 'because it was so much easier than school'. Now 25, she has appeared in over 70 films. 'It works out about one a month during my career. That's nothing: someone like Tabatha Cash makes around 300 movies a year.'

Nonetheless, Trinh Thi is noted for her aggressive on-screen persona. 'She's been in some of the hottest travelogue-type sex vids of the past few years,' says one website dedicated to such matters, 'including totally stunning work in Triple X: Part III and World Sex Tour Number Two - a very real, very erotic slice of porn greatness.'

After forming a mutual admiration society - Trinh Thi had read Baise-Moi five times before they met, while the novelist knew her film work - she and Despentes decided to direct the film version together. Shortly afterwards they discovered the two leads, Raffaela Anderson and Karen Bach, in a pseudo-documentary porn flick called Exhibition 99, in which 10 actresses are interviewed as 'themselves', between sexual interludes. 'These two were really different from the other girls,' says Trinh Thi. 'The little one, Raffaela, was very funny. The big one, Karen, looked like she could beat someone up.' (Anderson subsequently used the notoriety of Baise-Moi as a springboard for her own bestselling autobiography, entitled Hard, in which she claimed to have lost her virginity at the age of 18 on the set of her first porn movie.)

Despentes and Trinh Thi's use of porn actors was both pragmatic and idealistic. Having decided the sex should be real rather than simulated, they needed actors accustomed to being filmed in flagrante delicto. Then there was the financial consideration, given an initial $375,000 bdget and the subject matter. Porn actors come much cheaper than their mainstream counterparts.

'The first part of the film,' says Trinh Thi, 'the rape scene and the scene in the tabac, that's all part of everyday France. After that, the film becomes much more like a cartoon, a comic strip. It's a fantasy, a rather joyful fantasy. There's a kind of irony in the choreographic death scenes.

'In the end,' she adds, 'it was much better that we produced it cheaply, with a "trash" aesthetic. Can you imagine trying to make such a film with Hollywood production values? Not only would it have been inappropriate, it would have taken forever.'

'Me and Coralie, we're really masochists,' says Despentes, as they both start laughing. 'The more we suffer, the more we have the impression that things are going well. Budget

'It was difficult from the start to the end,' she continues. 'People thought we would argue, so nobody wanted us to direct. Then they said Karen and Raffaela wouldn't be able to act, that it was a bad idea to use porn actresses, that it was a bad idea to show real sex, that it was a mistake to shoot it on DV because it wasn't high quality, that it was wrong to use available light because nobody would be able to see anything, and so on and so on.'

'And the funniest thing,' says Trinh Thi, 'is that after we made the movie, everybody said, "Oh, of course, it's so easy to shoot a low-budget movie on DV with no lights and two ex-porn stars. Obviously it was going to work." In fact every single decision was a risk, every idea was dangerous, a step into unknown territory. Everything was a struggle, every idea had to be haggled over, because there was no money.

'It was so speedy, and I think that sense of threat, of being exhausted and exposed and vulnerable, but still speeding ahead, that comes out in the film. We were always on the edge of making a bad movie, of the production grinding to a halt through lack of money, of pressure from outside influences - it was very difficult.'

In order to maintain the pace and get some emotional distance from the intensity of the work, the co-directors needed a little pick-me-up. More than a little, actually. 'We ended up completely steamrollered with cocaine,' says Trin Thi. 'We started taking a fair amount during the shoot. Then afterwards, we had the promotion, and since I can't stand that part of the business, the cocaine allowed us to sort of disconnect from our emotions and keep going, when normally we would have stopped. Then, after the promo came the ban, and it was just too much, we were incapable of continuing without it. We were exhausted. All I wanted to do was sleep, but there was so much fuss, and we were so wired, that I couldn't even do that.'

'I told you we were masochists,' says Despentes, laughing. 'We were really getting a lot of hassle, so it helped, because we weren't in any condition to deal with the ban after a year of living right on the edge.'

On its French release in June 2000, Baise Moi was initially cleared for over-16s, the norm for a film containing graphic sex or violence. But following intense lobbying by Promouvoir - a religious organ of the extreme-right, with links to the neo-fascist MNR (a splinter group of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front) - the State Council withdrew the film's visa d'exploitation or commercial certificate, thereby effectively banning it, all in the name of 'Judaeo-Christian values'.

This, the first outright ban on a film in France since 1973, caused a media storm. One side denouncing 'totalitarian state censorship' while the other vilified 'vicious pornography'. In the middle, Despentes and Trinh Thi were roundly ignored by those defending their freedom of expression.

'Me and Coralie,' explains Despentes, 'we didn't go to any of the grandes écoles [the French equivalent of Oxbridge], we didn't do classic cinema studies, we both have strong links with the so-called margins of society, so everything about us was deeply disturbing to the cinematic and media industries. If we'd had the conventional French attitude - you know, conceptual discourse, the right references, something a little less visceral and more intellectual - they would have been reassured. Instead, we were simply too raw, too real for them. Of course, they want to make films about people like us, but they don't want us in their cosy little cinematic world.

'The real problem,' she continues, 'is that Baise-Moi is a film about violent "lower class" women, made by supposedly marginal women. The mainstream doesn't want to hear about people with nothing, the disenfranchised, the marginals, taking up arms and killing people for fun and money. It happens, of course, but we're not allowed to acknowledge it.

'Then there's the question of the actresses. Of course it's fine to have porn films and porn actresses, but when you put them in a naturalistic drama that causes all kinds of problems. Why? Because you've destroyed the idea that they are sexual toys and brought them to life.'

So while Parisian intellectuals demanded the restoration of the film's visa d'exploitation, more effective and direct support came in the form of a counter-petition to Promouvoir's, launched by Catherine Breillat (director of the less controversial but equally graphic film Romance), and signed by French notables, including Jean-Luc Godard, Miou-Miou, Sonia Rykiel and Claire Denis. Meanwhile, some independent cinema owners defied the ban, risking a hefty fine in the process.

Eventually, the state compromised by awarding the film an 'X' certificate, a classification normally reserved for porn movies. Catherine Tasca, French culture minister, moved swiftly and quietly to reinstall the long-abolished '18' certificate, and the film was eventually reclassified and re-released under this category.

The ban, say the co-directors, was a form of 'ritual humiliation', a way of making an example of them. 'We really took the brunt of a lot of prejudice and paranoia,' says Despentes. 'We didn't realise just how much fear and hatred it would arouse, but it definitely stoked up a lot of nasty stuff. Not least because it's about poor, non-white women. In France, there's real conflict between the white majority and the Arabic population. Our two lead actresses both have African roots - one is half-Moroccan, the other half-Algerian - and in France, don't harbour any illusions, it's visceral, this problem. A lot of people really don't want to see two North African women who have been raped taking up arms and shooting European men. That's a little too close to historical reality.'

If nothing else, Despentes is an equal-opportunity iconoclast. Having dismissed the government 'reactionaries' who banned her, she is similarly scathing about supposedly radical critics who damned her with faint praise.

'They said that we made an auteur film, but with French auteur films nothing happens and they bore you shitless. In our film at least there's plenty of action. If nothing else, you can't complain of being bored.'

Britain's tabloid moralists should be forewarned: Virginie Despentes freely admits she always intended to kick up a fuss, and to enrage the cinematic establishment. 'I love getting people beside themselves with rage. There's a great pleasure in pissing people off. At least it makes them talk about things.'

And with a final flourish of her umpteenth roll-up, she dismisses the argument that her film glamorises violence. 'I'm certainly doing less harm with my film than the extreme right when they descend in the street to threaten immigrants, or the anti-abortionists who invade hospitals and clinics to prevent operations. That's the real violence and obscenity in our society.'