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Hunger artist
Claire Denis and the way of all flesh
BY PETER KEOUGH

Trouble Every Day
Directed by Claire Denis. Written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau. With Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas, Florence Loiret-Caille, Nicolas Duvauchelle, and Raphaël Neal. A Lot 47 Films release. At the Brattle Theatre.

The conventional wisdom states that vampire movies are about desire, seduction, resistance, and release. From Nosferatu to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sex lies at the heart of the genre. Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day drives a stake through that heart. It’s the worst date movie ever made, and forget about any plans for a romantic dinner afterward.

Not that it’s graphic — Denis is no George Romero. Instead, it crosses the line not just between lovemaking and vampirism but between vampirism and cannibalism. Sucking blood may possess a concupiscent je ne sais quoi, but once it degenerates into noshing on tender extremities, the honeymoon is over. What exactly Coré (Béatrice Dalle) and later Shane (Vincent Gallo) — former researchers suffering from some shocking malaise picked up presumably while working on a taboo project in the tropics — do to their victims is left vague, as is most of the movie. In that vagueness the imagination conjures terrible possibilities.

One possibility is that the real horror in this film is a horror vacui. Although straddling the macabre eroticism of a film like The Hunger and the clinical nihilism of David Cronenberg, the seduction of Trouble Every Day is one not of desire or repulsion but of ennui, melancholy, and extinction. The mood is echoed in the blues rhythms of the barely articulated title tune from the British band the Tindersticks, a sad, sardonic theme that sways like a noose, providing the backdrop for all that follows, and pursuing you long after the movie is over.

In a sense, the film is all ending, the repetition of a compulsion that provides no satisfaction, only purgation and regret. As played by Dalle, Coré looks like some alluring carnivorous plant blooming by the roadway, her sofa-cushion lips surrounded by drawn, fevered need. A truck driver stops for her, night falls, and her husband, Léo (Alex Descas, a French Samuel L. Jackson), tracks her down, cleans up the bloody aftermath, and locks her up again in her steel-shuttered room.

Meanwhile, the American Shane — portrayed by Gallo as Vlad the Impaler with a heroin addiction and uttering his dialogue in a monotone as if he were miles away from the meaning of the words — is heading to Paris, ostensibly on his honeymoon with his unlikely bride, June. Played by Tricia Vessey, June is a cross between Amélie and Audrey Hepburn, a cheerful if worried sprite whose Easter egg–hued, color-coordinated suits are a brave attempt to introduce some color into the film other than that of pools of gore or Seine sunsets. In one startling image, her turquoise scarf sails off Notre-Dame, its vividness lost in the clammy gray. She’s naive but smart enough to be uneasy when Shane gazes at her with blood-drenched fantasies in his mind. Her concern increases when he cuts short their lovemaking, retreating to the bathroom, where he leaves a very big mess indeed. Nonetheless, she wishes Shane would come home, or at least come.

In fact, Shane has traveled to Paris to find Léo, who might help him with this problem he has separating his libido from his lunch. As he tries to track down his former colleague, we learn from flashbacks (brief, and, of course, vague) and barely glimpsed files on a laptop that Léo was on the verge of some psychopharmacological discovery that will make people happy, especially the patent holders, until, in the mad-scientist tradition, something apparently went terribly awry. Fevered and sunken-eyed, Shane searches for Léo, but he’s tempted to seek relief from his urges with the birdlike hotel maid (Florence Loiret-Caille), drawn by the fetishistic knot of hair on the nape of her neck . . .

Léo, of course, has problems of his own, and his measures prove inadequate to restrain the feral, fascinating Coré. Denis, too, is having trouble deciding what her film is about. She’s not too interested in a tight or cogent story line, for the tale’s origins are perfunctory and its brutal dénouement is more exploitative than enigmatic. As a variation on the horror genre Trouble Every Day also seems half-hearted; such conventional details as brains percolating in vats verge on camp before retreating to the mundane.

A politic parable? All the victims are proles, lumpen and otherwise, whereas the "villains" are members of the intelligentsia, agents, witting or not, of corporate power. Is this a study of sexual pathology, an investigation of the precise moment when moans of ecstasy turn to howls of agony, when lust turns into violence, and of how both sexes can suffer and inflict equal outrages? All interpretations apply, but none fully accounts for this haunting and exasperating tone poem of revulsion and regret, a come-on and a turn-off that is troubling in every way.

Issue Date: April 25 - May 2, 2002
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