Doctor Leo looks almost fatherly when he has to collect his girlfriend Coré at night. With a guilty look on her face, she sits huddled on an embankment in the Parisian banlieue, her face covered in blood. Next to her lies a dead man with a strangely disfigured face. Leo (Alex Descas) seems to already know this and cleans up, bringing Coré home. He keeps her here in a room like an animal and tries in vain to keep her from her forays.
Madness, desire and power are the driving forces in Claire Denis’ horror film “Trouble Every Day” and come to a head in scenes of bloody rage right from the start. The film premiered in Cannes in 2001 and can now be seen in Germany for the first time. The Cologne film distributor Rapid Eye Movies is releasing it in a digitally restored version, which was supervised by camerawoman Agnès Godard and approved by Denis.
It’s a small miracle for a film that’s over twenty years old, but this moment in French cinema is ideal: With her sensual, cannibalistic horror fantasy, Denis anticipates almost transgressive female body cinema like “Raw” by Julia Ducournau, the genre and challenges gender norms and last year won the Palme d’Or in Cannes with her erotic machine film “Titane”.
In a way, this closes the circle to films that were released around the turn of the millennium and were subsequently summarized under the heading “New French Extremity”. Filmmakers such as Catherine Breillat, Bertrand Bonello and Gaspar Noé deliberately dealt with breaking taboos and transgressing norms in order to explore both intellectual and film-aesthetic boundaries.
The moments of desire are equally disturbing and intimate
Claire Denis was the first to do this: she uses flashes of memory and daydreams to compose an elliptical image of Coré’s condition, which Leo believes to be a mysterious infection. Connections are slowly forming with the American physician Shane (Vincent Gallo), who is honeymooning in Paris with his wife June. Actually, he is looking for Leo, because like Coré he has to suppress his thirst for blood again and again. He’s literally fleeing the recurring images in his mind of June smeared with blood in his arms.
With Shane and Coré, Claire Denis explores the field between love and drives, loyalty and self-determination and questions standardized notions of intimacy between tenderness and pleasure in pain. In these equally disturbing and intimate moments, camerawoman Agnes Godard gets so close to the bodies, which are often still intertwined in the act of love, that they seem to fall into individual parts – even before the kisses turn into blood-smeared bites.
This is supported by the British band’s meditative soundtrack Tindersticks, with whom Denis works regularly. Already in the opening sequence, a melancholy floating waltz announces this downside – or is it a flowing extension? – romantic love. “Look into my eyes, you see trouble every day. It’s on the inside of me” it says, while a young couple kisses extensively on the back seat of a car.
Claire Denis penetrates deep into the texture of physical desire with “Trouble Every Day”. She not only challenges the hidden emotions, but also the deep-seated unconscious drives and needs, pouring them into images, sounds, affects and weaving them into an equally physical and hypnotic collage of irrational desire. Despite all the dissolution of boundaries, pain and pleasure always have something deliberate, maybe even something self-reflective. This intoxication always thinks about the emptiness and bad conscience that will follow.
Béatrice Dalle makes Coré an ambivalent figure. Beguiling and repulsive at the same time, she keeps looking for ways to avoid Leo’s pathologization of her lust and yet she can’t get away from him. What if she isn’t the perpetrator of violence here? The initially male view of Coré changes over the course of the film and gives her back a piece of self-determination as she crosses borders.
Trouble Every Day, France 2001 – Director: Claire Denis. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean Pol Fargeau. Camera: Agnes Godard. Music: Tindersticks. Starring: Vincent Gallo, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas, Tricia Vessey. Rapid Eye Movies. Theatrical release: March 3, 2022.