Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 28, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
If a movie tries but completely fails to be shocking, can it still be considered a horror film? That’s the question begged by Trouble Every Day, which is arriving in American theaters on a wave of European buzz centering on its graphic and gruesome content. To be sure, there are a pair of extremely nasty gore scenes on view, one at about the halfway point and one at the end, but genre fans anxious to witness them should be advised that they only arrive after long stretches of lethargic, drawn-out scenes of uninteresting character interaction. Caveat emptor.
Writer/director Claire Denis is apparently trying to make a statement about the consuming nature of love (presenting the hunger for another in a literal sense), and it might have helped if she and co-scripter Jean-Pol Fargeau had presented people and situations that were remotely involving. The plot certainly sounds like it has possibilities in the retelling, following Coré (Béatrice Dalle), a Parisian woman who suffers from an affliction which causes her to devour the flesh of her sex partners (and must thus be kept a virtual prisoner by her husband in their house), and Shane (Vincent Gallo), a newly married doctor who brings his bride June (Tricia Vessey) to Paris for a honeymoon. It appears that Shane is beginning to suffer the same malady that afflicts Coré, and that Coré’s husband might hold the key to the source of their illness.
Seems intriguing, right? Not as presented by Denis in a series of long, often wordless takes with a pace that certain critics like to call languid and struck this viewer as dead boring. Almost nothing about the characters’ backgrounds or relationships is made clear; we’re apparently supposed to glean the characters’ inner lives and motivations from their gestures, their pauses, their looks, but the meanings remain elusive and no attempt is made to give these people feelings and emotions that a viewer can respond to. Gallo, Dalle and Vessey are good actors apparently quite in tune with Denis’ goals, but her distanced, airless approach leaves them moving through a dramatic void and a suffocating air of pretension.
Then, of course, there are the gore scenes. Both Coré and Shane get to show off their penchant for flesheating, and while the resulting makeup FX sequences are admittedly unnerving to look at and well-brought-off technically, they have no emotional impact because what’s around them has no emotional impact. Sure, they’re shocking on a base level (and gorehounds may dig them), but what’s most offensive is Denis’ insistence that they Mean Something, and represent anything other than a director getting off on the freedom modern cinema provides.
Not to mention that which being a female director provides; if a scene like Shane’s cannibalistic rape of a helpless woman appeared in a movie helmed by a man, it would be reviled as outrageously sexist. Denis may have intended the moment as some sort of metaphor, but the scene comes off as blunt and revolting as something out of I Spit on Your Grave; divorced from any meaningful context, it is one of the most gratuitous and unpleasant scenes of violence in recent memory. We’re also treated to Shane jerking off on screen, if that’s your bag.
In the end, what do we really learn about these people? Pretty much nothing. No doubt there will be some who derive deep meaning out of Denis’ obtuse and obscure musings on the human condition, but most horror fans interested in a French exploration of intertwined sex and death will be better served by curling up with a good Jean Rollin DVD.
