2001, France/Germany/Japan
A surprising genre entry from Claire Denis, Trouble Every Day both averts and indulges the spectacle of the genre in its story of an enigmatic illness and the people whose lives are doomed by it.
It takes some time before we can fathom the connection between the characters introduced: Core (Beatrice Dalle), the cannibalistic wife of Dr. Leo Semeneau (Alex Descas), whose radical brain research saw him exiled from the scientific community; American newlyweds Shane and June Brown (Vincent Gallo and Tricia Vessey); and Christelle (Florence Loiret Caille), the young chambermaid at the newlyweds’ hotel who will become a pawn in Shane’s degeneration.
Shane is a scientist at a leading U.S. laboratory who has brought his pixie-ish wife to Paris under the auspices of it being their honeymoon; but his mandate is primarily to seek out Semeneau, whose experiments have some connection to Shane’s bloody hallucinations and his inability to have a consummate relationship with his increasingly frustrated young bride.
Meanwhile Coré, locked up in a farmhouse just outside the city and refusing to take her medication, finds ways to escape so that she can prey on strangers in the road before Léo comes to collect her and take her home.
This will prove a common routine for Coré – despondency is followed by mania and then decompression, and Léo comes to wash it all away at the end of every day. He delicately wipes her skin clean, gets rid of the bodies, reassembles destroyed furniture, fortifies the house further.
The flm blends starkness and excess, with very little dialogue other than a few moments of stilted exposition (and you can tell Denis really hates to give you any at all) contrasted with scenes of Grand-Guignol horror that spill more blood than even your average slasher film.
When some neighbourhood boys try to break in to save her after seeing Coré banging on the windows, she seduces one of them through the slats of wood that have been nailed up outside her bedroom door to keep her in.
Yanking the planks free, he embraces her, and she nibbles at him playfully before riling herself into a state of frenzy and ripping a hole in his throat.
As he shrieks with pain and gurgles on his own blood, she slaps him excitedly, rubbing her face on him like a pet and chewing off bits of his flesh in graphic detail.
Later, she paces back and forth in front of a wall painted with his blood, like an expressionistic souvenir of her day’s work.
Like Luciana in Alberto Cavallone’s Man, Woman and Beast (reviewed elsewhere in this appendix), Cores sexual hunger manifests as violent physical appetite, and whatever illness she has, has also afflicted Shane from some long-ago experiments his wife knows nothing about.
We are never told what the experiments were about (although the imagery ties it to a sexually transmitted disease) or who experimented on whom, but we know that Shane fears the advancement of the illness in himself, as he starts exhibiting primal, irresponsible behaviour and edging close to violence.
For most of the film, Shane is a passive predator – but we can see through Core’s monstrous gluttony what he is going to become.
hexafu 