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Also this issue: And So To Bed Thrilling |
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May 23-29, 2002
movies
 BLOODY HELL: A thoroughly satisfied Bˇatrice Dalle in Trouble Every Day. |
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Trouble Every DayWritten and directed by Claire Denis A Lot 47 release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse
Recommended
Like any movie that leaves you feeling as if your nerve endings have been doused with scalding water, Trouble Every Day is tough to recommend, exactly. It’s certainly not the kind of thing you “enjoy.” And yet so few movies slip the bondage of predetermined scenarios and predictable setups that when one manages to truly affect you, to burn itself into your brain, you can’t help but want to spread the word.
A good deal of Trouble Every Day is, it should be mentioned, nonsense. Clad in his usual long-collared polyester shirts (you wonder if he has it written into his contract), Vincent Gallo looks nothing like the neurologist he's supposed to be, and the movie's pseudoscientific asides come off even more parodically than they're probably intended to be. Béatrice Dalle, as Gallo's ex-wife and former object of study, chews not only scenery but co-stars, as a woman afflicted with a pathological hunger for both sex and flesh, which she graphically indulges at the same time. As Gallo's new wife, Tricia Vessey (Ghost Dog) has the movie's saddest role, struggling to understand the obsessions that drive her husband to both profess his love and rebuff her advances.
What makes Trouble Every Day so upsetting, and so effective, is Denis' inversion of typical horror movie tropes. During the movie's graphically staged assault scenes, you're sucked in not by the fear of being hurt (we barely know the victims) but by the fear of wounding others. Trouble stands vampire mythology on its head -- we're dealing not with demons, or even with sympathetic monsters, but with our own fear of crossing over. Science here is a sham, a misdirection; when we glimpse a lab technician dissecting a human brain, it looks like a piece of meat, both utterly mysterious and utterly mundane. Denis' flirtation with genre -- not just horror, but science fiction as well -- often feels more like an exercise than a reinterpretation, but when Trouble Every Day strikes out on its own, the effect is unlike anything you've ever seen.
