Trouble Every Day (2001; Claire Denis)

This was part of Shudder's recent "French Horror Extreme" March series of films added to the site...

I'm just a hick from Mississippi...I don't know what the fuck is wrong with Gallo and Dalle. They are drawn to blood retrieved during sex. I admire all the reviews that poetically arrive to a conclusion about metaphors and exceptionally analyze / theorize with great complexity all the meaning and definition from what Claire Denis has to say with this film about a Pharma doc and new wife (Gallo and Vessey) visiting Paris. From what I could extract from Gallo's visit to medical colleagues (and a past memory with a fellow co-worker at a lab), he was involved in a serious project in Guyana between a genius named Léo (Descas) and Léo's lover, Coré (Dalle). Gallo's Shane Brown is revealed in a conversation to be greedy and to achieve success steals from Leo's work. Eventually Shane finds Core, covered in blood after feeding off a young man desiring her for sex (he was wanting to steal from Leo's home, from what I could gather, finding Core boarded in a room, luring the horny guy into her lair), eventually leaving her to burn alive.

I totally understand why some just can't jive to this. I continue to find Denis a daring and accomplished filmmaker. I like how she shoots faces, conversations, editing scene to scene. I think she is certainly adept with how her camera makes love to pretty much every person in her films.

I can't say I'm a Gallo guy at all, but I do really like his "Buffallo '66" and I have seen "Brown Bunny", not exactly all the crazy about it. He seems to be quite a manic depressive, and his bag on the nightstand has a medicine cabinet of pills/bottles. He can't seem to be intimate with Vessey until he settles whatever bloodlust is keeping him unhappy. I say bloodlust because until he dominates a Parisian hotel maid he's fixated on (Florence Loiret-Caille) and feeds from her in the locker room, Gallo is just a sourpuss.

The trend does continue with me and Denis' output. This is my second film where I squirm and kvetch uncomfortably through another of her films. There is a scene on the subway where Gallo hones focus on a passenger's neck while she faces ahead. Only separated by a puppy he bought from a store, Gallo gets mighty tight on the woman's neck while a seated passenger (Houri) seems intrigued and attentive on him. I kept asking myself, "Doesn't she feel his breath on her neck he's so close?" And how he seems to gnaw on the crotch of the maid as she screams out in agony was practically unbearable for me to get through. It was just grotesque. Not that Dalle playfully smearing her face in the blood of a dead victim and fingering a piece of shoulder flesh was exactly a walk in the park!

I always find Dalle mesmerizing no matter how horrifying and frightening she is. There is just something magnetic about her. But Vessey's performance shouldn't get lost in the shuffle. How she wants the marriage to work, the effort she puts into shaking her husband out of his melancholia, and how she remains so willing to make him happy; Vessey isn't just a pretty face to shoot as rain pelts her in the night. But I was as captivated with Loiret-Caille as Gallo...the mundane day-to-day as a maid is perfectly realized in her abject presence and boredom. But there was just a beauty about her, and Denis' camera knows that. Her demise is just wrenching to me. This thought screamed in my head as Gallo seems to gain control over her: GET THE FUCK OUTTA THERE!!!