Director – Claire Denis, Screenplay – Claire Denis & Jean-Poi Fargeau, Producer – Georges Benayoun, Photography – Agnes Godard, Music – Tindersticks, Makeup Effects – Dominique Colladant, Production Design – Arnaud de Molreon. Production Company – Masseoud-a Films/Rezo Productions/Arte France Cinema/Dacia Films/Kinetique Inc/Canal+/Arte-ZDF/Rezo Films.
Cast
Vincent Gallo (Shane Brown), Tricia Vessey (June Brown), Beatrice Dalle (Coré), Alex Descas (Dr Leo Semeaneau), Florence Loiret-Caille (Christelle), Nicolas Duvauchelle (Erwan), Raphael Neal (Ludo), Jose Garcia (Choart), Helene Lapiower (Malecot), Marilu Marini (Frieesen), Aurore Clement (Jeanne)
Plot
American pharmaceutical research scientist Shane Brown flies in to Paris with his newlywed wife June on their honeymoon. While there, Shane begins a search for Dr Leo Semeaneau, who wrote a paper that he wishes to develop in his research, but Leo seems to have disappeared. Leo is tending his wife Coré who has developed an illness where she is driven to have sex with someone and then kill them and devour their flesh. It becomes apparent that Shane also suffers the same condition.
French director Claire Denis has emerged as a significant force since her first appearance in the late 1980s. She has made films such as Chocolat (1988), Beau Travail (1999), White Material (2009), Let the Sunshine In (2017), Both Sides of the Blade (2022) and Stars at Noon (2022), and has won and been nominated for a host of awards. Denis has also been an occasional dabbler in genre material with I Can’t Sleep (1994), a film loosely based on the activities of a true-life serial killer, and subsequently the space expedition film High Life (2018).
Trouble Every Day is pegged as a horror film, although I am not entirely sure if that is what Claire Denis had in mind when she made the film. Certainly, she makes no effort to adhere to any kind of genre tropes. Not for that matter to offer any explanations for the afflictions suffered by Beatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo – with a tiny twist of the dial, what we have could have mapped over onto being a zombie film, a vampire film, a cannibal film, an infectious condition or just an everyday psycho film. At most, it feels like she is making a film about some type of fictional mental disorder or Sexual Fetishism.
When we first meet him, Vincent Gallo is sickly, unshaven, with pale pallor and red eyes. As a character, he seems an enigma to us – he is on a mission to find a scientist on behalf of a pharmaceutical company where he is accused at one point of possibly having a dubious agenda. Despite a reasonable part of the plot given over to Gallo’s quest, none of this proves relevant other than providing the impetus for him going in search of the scientist’s home.
A blood-drenched Beatrice Dalle
Claire Denis is a director who eschews traditional plotting. Most of the film is the very French manner of slow scenes observing people in mundane everyday situations. The film rarely ever gives much clue what is going on. You spend a lot of time trying to work out who each of the characters are and their relationship to each other. I was never sure, for example, whether Beatrice Dalle was Alex Descas’s wife or not, while it is alluded at one point that Vincent Gallo’s character once had an affair with her. The slowness often drags the film out to a point of tedium.
Denis even directs sex scenes in the same manner. She places the focus in closeup on expanses of flesh – where you are often not sure if what you are looking at is an elbow or an area of stomach or thigh. This has undeniable effect during the scene where Beatrice Dalle seduces Nicolas Duvauchelle, one of the teen hooligans who break into the house (who they are and what they keep trying to break in is another thing never made clear). The scenes are shot as bodies together in closeup before the undeniably effective shock where Beatrice begins biting on his neck and tearing his flesh out in a mad frenzy.
There is an even more unsettling scene right near the end where Vincent Gallo comes up to a hotel cleaner (Florence Loiret-Caille) and forces himself onto her, ending with them having sex on the floor. It is a scene where you can be certain whether it is rape or consensual – it starts out as the former but then she begins to respond to him – before he goes down on her and she writhes in pain before we see him come up with his mouth covered in blood. The last thing we see is him dragging her dead body away.
