Trouble Every Day, 2001.
Directed by Claire Denis.
Starring Vincent Gallo, Béatrice Dalle, Tricia Vessey, Alex Descas, Nicolas Duvauchelle.
SYNOPSIS:
A newlywed American doctor goes to Paris to track down a woman with similar cannibalistic tendencies as he has.
How ironic that a movie from the New French Extremity period is now not so new and is being released on physical media under Eureka’s Masters of Cinema imprint. You can be as radical and contemporary as you like, but time catches up to everything in the end.
As it does with Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo), an American doctor newly married to June (Tricia Vessey) and honeymooning in Paris, but his reasons for being there are not quite so romantic as he is trying to locate the whereabouts of former colleague Dr. Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) and his wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle), with whom Shane had formerly been obsessed. The reason for this obsession is that Coré has a taste for human blood that was brought on by her husband’s neurological experiments, so much so that she seduces men and bites them to death whilst having sex with them, shortly before her husband has to clean up and dispose of the bodies.
Shane has similar lustful urges to Coré that he is finding harder and harder to keep in check, and after finding out where the Sémeneaus’ are he leaves his new bride to go visit the much-troubled couple, where hilarity certainly does not ensue.
Trouble Every Day caused a lot of controversy when it was shown at Cannes, causing walkouts and fainting amongst audience members, and when put into context it is easy to see why as it is a very bleak and disturbing piece of work, and in an era when Hollywood was still high on churning out glossy, second-rate Scream clones it no doubt came as a massive shock to witness something so visceral and intense. Nearly a quarter-of-a-century later – the genre having gone through torture porn, J-horror and the extreme French movies that followed it – and Trouble Every Day’s more gruesome aspects maybe don’t seem quite as tasteless(!) as they once did.
But that is nothing to do with the gore scenes – few and far between as they are – as they are fantastically shot and still manage to outdo most modern effects with how realistic they look. It also helps that Trouble Every Day is a movie built around emotion rather than action and is trying to create an atmosphere and theme of coping with overwhelming desire, albeit a desire for human flesh rather than love or acceptance, but in between the scenes that build those things not a lot actually happens and the pace drags, especially when Vincent Gallo or Béatrice Dalle are not onscreen as everyone else is, through no fault of their own, a lot less interesting than they are.
In a largely wordless first act, Trouble Every Day suffers for the vague nature of its characterisation and for how drawn-out these quiet scenes are, as we watch Shane carry June across the threshold of their hotel room and then just lay on the bed as the maid unfolds the bedsheets. Yes, there are interactions between Shane and the maid later on that provide more substance, but these long and meandering scenes do nothing to tell us who these people are or why they are acting like they do.
However, when it does kick off Trouble Every Day does so in typical artistic French style and visually offers up sex and death in equal measure. No doubt director Claire Denis is trying to say something about the nature of desire and the heart wanting what it wants, but what that something is never really gets made clear. Maybe it isn’t supposed to and we are just meant to watch bad people doing bad things because they can no longer help themselves, but without any clear resolution or meaning behind it all, it just comes off as gratuitous and a bit self-indulgent.
Limited to a pressing of 3000 copies, this 4K UHD/Blu-ray dual-format set comes with a new audio commentary by horror scholar Lindsay Hallam, archive commentary by director Claire Denis and director of photography Agnès Godard, an interview with New French Extremity expert Alice Haylett Bryan and a video essay by film scholar Virginie Sélavy, all of which probably offer more context or thought-provoking reasons than what the movie script does. Nevertheless, Trouble Every Day is still one to see if extreme horror is your thing because it does offer a glimpse of a time when graphic sex and violence was not so commonplace outside of underground film festivals and direct-to-video titles that nobody wanted to promote. It isn’t as relentlessly brutal as Frontier(s) or as existentially disturbing as Martyrs – despite it trying to be – but it still isn’t something to watch on a first date or Christmas afternoon with the family, as full-on cannibalistic rape is not for the squeamish.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
