Cast in a dreamy mix of blue, purple and black, the opening of Trouble Every Day captures Paris as its most commonly drawn in the popular imagination, a romantic reverie of entwined lovers and old Seine bridges at sunset. Ironic but not in a comic sense, these images display an amazing sense of light as a palpable force, a player in a Manichean struggle between good and evil. This tangible quality persists as the action quickly shifts away from the city, transitioning to a harsh sodium yellow cast on luminous fields, captured as if there were more than one moon illuminating the sky. The effect is still exquisite, but also disturbing, an aspect confirmed when a motorcyclist encounters a mangled corpse in the grass, a blood-smeared woman gnawing on a chunk of viscera a few yards away.
As with many of Denis’ films, Trouble Every Day is a beautiful movie about ugliness, a tightly wound thriller whose plot is sculpted down to its bare essence, capable of jarring pivots between enchantment and horror. At the center of the story are two doomed couples, one whose flaws lean toward the Gothic (he keeps her locked in a room, and cleans up the mess when she escapes and cheats with, then feeds upon, strange men), one toward the Romantic. The latter couple, young honeymooners June (Tricia Vessey) and Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo), display the careless solipsism of new love as they drape across their tousled hotel bed, seemingly unaware of the maid trying to pull the dirty sheets from beneath them.
It’s another ludicrous image delivered with a straight face, and helps to further identify the closed-off parity shared between the two couples. Each presents as a capsular unit threatened by an intrusion. For the Browns, it’s the unwitting maid who pops up again and again, fascinated with either Shane or the glamorous couple as a unit. In the case of Dr. Semenau (Alex Descas) and his bedeviled wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle), it’s the two teen boys next door, fixated on the mysterious goings-on in their neighbor’s shuttered residence.
This pair eventually breaks in, with one immediately falling victim to the temptress behind the barred door, ripping off nailed two-by-fours to gain access to her chamber. He gets what he’s looking for, then is consumed in excruciating fashion, his mouth and tongue torn out in a horrific parody of the amorous scenes preceding the act of violence. This depiction of female sexuality as something so ravenous it must be isolated behind lock and key is another instance of humor that refuses catharsis, tacking toward distress-inducing carnage instead. The condition that Coré is experiencing is never explained, but it’s hinted to potentially be a side effect of experiments conducted by her husband, who now serves as the Renfield to her gender-flipped Dracula. It’s also what draws in Shane, a fellow physician who uses his honeymoon as a pretext to track down his former colleague’s wife, with whom he developed an obsession years earlier.
A further indication of Denis’ savvy eye for actors is the casting of Gallo – who’s spent the two decades since the film’s release engaging in increasingly egregious behavior – as a paragon of toxic masculinity. Here his character is portrayed as grotesque even when doting on his new bride, aping the staggered gait of Frankenstein’s monster or the faces of gargoyles on a cathedral tour, demonstrating an unsteady balance between bug-eyed insanity and disheveled attractiveness. As in the cinema of Jane Campion, Denis is fond of surveying the thin lines that separate desire and disgust. This is represented in the pairing of Shane and Coré, who seem destined to be together, yet who instead remain attached to partners who tolerate and enable their destructive behavior, for reasons the film mostly keeps remote from us.
This symmetrical but off-kilter narrative structure, which subverts the couple-swapping format of classic farce, is key to the film’s embrace of comic tropes pushed toward opposite ends. Rather than utilize the standard language with which most movies express love and desire, Trouble Every Day employs clinical methods, establishing blood, spit and semen as its means of expression and exchange, both for sublimated feelings and potential contagion. The freeness with which these fluids flow serves as a contrast to the sterility of the film’s repeated lab scenes, which nevertheless highlight the vaguely sexualized swaying of centrifuges and other equipment, more half-humorous perversity in an unlikely setting. At one point, a quizzical Shane examines his wife’s nude body in the bathtub, what might normally be a seductive image instead evaporating any lingering mystery around the realities of the human form. The water looks turbid and brothy, like dirty bathwater actually would, as a series of tight close-ups culminates with a shot that foregrounds her pubic area against her wedding band, identifying both as symbolic sources of the impurity.
The sequence is another masterful invocation of the gray areas in which pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, can commingle in uncomfortable fashion. When Shane and Coré’s magnetic poles are finally drawn together, these opposing sides are briefly brought into balance, but the synthesis that results is not any obvious fusion between the two. No fluids are exchanged, no answers are given and the apparent infection is not passed on. Instead, Shane overpowers and strangles the cursed woman, then confirms the cleansing nature of this act by masturbating in the hotel bathroom and buying his wife a puppy, another darkly hilarious gesture. He follows this by stalking, raping and feeding on the maid, confirming himself as the film’s lone remaining monster, but is nevertheless granted the reprieve of a cleansing shower and a new start with his unwitting wife. While female monstrousness is something to be shunned and hidden away, the male equivalent is de rigueur and ordinary, a constituent element of a society in which unresolvable oppositions and inequities are held together in a sickening sort of balance.
The post Oeuvre: Claire Denis: Trouble Every Day appeared first on Spectrum Culture.