| Vincent Gallo and French siren Beatrice Dalle star as
strangers who share an unhealthy penchant for cannibalistic
lovemaking in Trouble Every Day, but the real star of this sometimes
unbelievably gruesome film is acclaimed French director Claire
Denis. Long heralded as one of the shining figures of the "new
French New Wave," Denis' last film-the sumptuous Beau Travail,
a loose, homoeroticized adaptation of Melville's Billy Budd-marked
both a critical and artistic turning point in the director's
career. That film's starkly realized panoramas of hardened French
Legion soldiers adrift in the vast nothingness of the East African
Djibouti desert and coiled emotions on the verge of bursting
forth into paroxysms of violence combined to create one of 1999's
most stunning features. And though her follow-up retains much
of the marvelous cinematography and roiling, unstable emotional
crises of that small masterpiece, Trouble Every Day is also
an expertly clever reworking of the horror genre and its most
striking (and familiar) themes.
The story revolves around two strangers-Shane (Gallo), a
scientist visiting Paris with his new wife June (Vessey) on
their honeymoon, and Coré (Dalle), a troubled beauty
whose scientist husband Léo (Descas) imprisons her
in their house while he goes off to work-who are linked by
a mysterious sexual illness that produces uncontrollable urges
to violently murder and "consume" their amorous
partners during lovemaking. Shane, unbeknownst to his new
bride, is in Paris clandestinely (and desperately) searching
for Léo, who may have had a part in inflicting him
with this deadly malady and whom, he hopes, may have an answer
to his increasingly unsettling condition. Meanwhile, Coré
has somehow been transformed into a bestial sexual predator
by her disease, which, day after day, causes her to escape
her confines to go in search of fresh meat.
Vampirism-as-sexual metaphor is nothing new, but Denis and
fellow screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau craft the film as an
almost completely silent tone poem about the ravaging power
of desire in the style (spiritually, if not literally) of
German expressionistic vampire films. While much of the film
finds its characters sleepwalking through an eerily subdued
Parisian landscape bereft of the colorful joy usually associated
with the city, the film is unwilling to look away from its
most grisly sequences of love-even those desensitized by the
unending bloodshed found in American cinema over the past
20 years will find Trouble Every Day's climactic scenes difficult
to take.
In the hands of Denis, these two star-crossed monsters' single-minded
hunger for brutal sexual gratification transcends horror film
clichés to become something more lyrically profound.
Aided by an ominously touching score courtesy of Nottingham's
Tindersticks and Godard's silky camera work, Denis unlocks
a subtle, yet disquieting, beauty in the film's grisly imagery.
Bereft of almost any dialogue, the film exhibits an exquisitely
somber tranquility that allows its actors-especially Gallo,
whose horribly taut countenance brings Shane's tumultuous
inner struggle to life-the freedom to inhabit these tortured
souls without the usual accompanying cacophony found in most
present-day horror films.
Denis once again employs the slow, longing camera movements
and long droughts of dialogue that so characterized her previous
masterpiece-as well as a fascination with the ways in which
outsiders struggle to find acceptance in a harsh, unforgiving
foreign environment-and here, too, those chasms of hushed
stillness continue to widen until the film erupts in an explosion
of ferocious savagery. But Trouble Every Day finds its solace
in a final touch of desperate reconciliation that may or may
not hint at possible redemption and, in this uplifting coda,
Denis finds a meditative conclusion to her tale of the ravaging
power of love. For if the act of loving someone is the simultaneous
destruction and acceptance of the object of affection, how
can any of us turn our heads away from the ensuing violence
of such emotions?
— Nicholas Schager
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While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
