| Jackson Stern |
Trouble Every Day plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, April 20th, through Tuesday, April 22nd. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. Maybe don’t blaze it during this one.
Claire Denis has always made monster movies. Or, at least, movies with monsters in them or, most commonly, movies about the survivors of monsters. Most of her films revolve around (or feature in a capacity) people who have been violated in some way, whether it’s because of an isolating society, sexual violence, or the horrors of colonization. These violations creep around her films like phantoms in the dark. There isn’t a clearer example of that than her take on a vampire horror film, Trouble Every Day (2001), though calling this a vampire film may sound somewhat misleading. In essence, it’s a lo-fi art film about a doctor, Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo), and his new wife, June (Tricia Vessey), honeymooning in Paris where he is consumed by some sort of affliction. Parallel to this is the story of a French doctor, Léo (Alex Descas) who’s wife Coré (the great Béatrice Dalle) seems to be harboring violent tendencies. These stories are shrouded in utmost mystery until they collide late in the film, in a moment that can only be described as sensually apocalyptic. This synopsis doesn’t exactly scream “vampire” but there are more than a few aspects of it that place the film in that canon, if only temperamentally. There are no fangs, expressionistic shadows, or Transylvanian accents but there is an intense sense of dread permeating the film that’s caused by carnal desire, violent appetites, and literal love sickness, all of which are themes found down in the deepest chambers of your Draculas and Nosferatus. But unlike in the classics, which tend to glaze over their themes in favor of style or spectacle, Denis weaponizes these subtexts as a means to further excavate the emptiness and primal impulses of her characters.
The film isn’t entirely devoid of visual or narrative acknowledgements to its more overt ancestors. A decent bit of the story revolves around a doctor helplessly looking for a cure or at least an explanation for these predacious impulses, a beat that’s given the stern, clinical arthouse treatment yet one that wouldn’t feel out of place in a B picture or Universal monster flick. A more nuanced example is the very memorable scene in which Shane and June visit the imposingly gothic site of the Notre Dame cathedral and Shane walks around as Frankenstein’s monster to amuse his wife. On the surface this is merely a cheeky homage but it’s one of the few times in which we see Shane in a placid, even playful mood. These scenes with his wife (of which there are fewer than you’d think) highlight the façade he must enact in order to keep his true feelings away from his wife. In the opening scene of the two he seems very loving and caring, looking at her with newlywed eyes and a genuine smile, but as soon as he “escapes” to the plane’s restroom, the mask drops. He looks exhausted and scared, almost on the verge of a panic attack. He has this thing inside him that he doesn’t understand—that he can probably never understand, and he knows it. Maybe it’s a disease he acquired from someone else or, more than likely, maybe he was born with it. To draw further parallels to creature features, there’s an almost Jekyll and Hyde quality to the character of Shane Brown: he’s a man determined to live a normal life yet is constantly forced to resign himself to his monstrous inclinations. It seems like he does truly love his wife but he just can’t help himself. These conflicting feelings inevitably lead to his loneliness, exemplified by his habitual look of complete dejection. This unsteady performance of Gallo’s also tends to bring to mind a more overtly pained and muted portrait of Bela Lugosi’s piercing eyes as he stalks Mina Harker. These are men with a fundamental proclivity to quell their cravings any way they can, predators who must stalk their prey, catch and kill. When they’re hungry, they gotta eat.
On the other side of the “feeder” spectrum (to borrow a term from Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All), you have Coré who appeases her hunger in a more seductive manner. The film opens with her attracting a truck driver before killing him and seemingly devouring part of him off screen. She throughout the film seems like more of a specter than even Shane, as behind her smile is a quiet discontent that we only ever get brief glimpses of. Later in the film, she seduces a young man with almost only glances and a smile… it’s truly her looks that kill. It’s interesting too how Denis and her DP (the legendary Agnès Godard) shoot the scenes of intimacy and later, violence. With Shane, there’s always a coldness that’s accentuated by the camera’s distance to its subject. Shane seems somewhat restrained and more calculated in these moments as the camera leers from afar, almost as if the film crew themselves was too afraid to dare to get closer. These types of scenes, however, are shot with a completely different disposition when the subject is Coré. The camera is way up close, more intimate than many viewers may even be comfortable with. There are these long, slow shots of the human body; the curvature of an elbow and the vastness of a back that looks like a barren desert… somewhat reminiscent of the aching sensuality found in Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Even when the kissing turns to licking and then to biting, the camera stays up close and personal as the blood begins to shed, as if this is the next logical step in intimacy. These scenes are framed in a way that excellently exemplifies the key difference between these two characters: Shane is unfamiliar with his affliction while Coré has grown used to hers, even enjoying it more openly. If Shane is a newborn Dracula, Coré is more like a ghoul out of Vampyros Lesbos, using her sexuality openly and somewhat confidently to fulfill her deepest, darkest desires.
As the film drives itself into its conclusion, it becomes increasingly obvious that we aren’t going to get any more answers, explanations, or cures for Shane’s illness/desires/whatever than they themselves get. There will be no doctor or detective coming in to explain the thing away à la Psycho nor any sort of criminal comeuppance for Shane. He will continue to live his life as a person split in two. One half of him will live during the day, living his life as the happy doctor with the happy wife. The other half of him will continue his nocturnal escapades with no ramifications. Maybe someday he’ll be caught or cured but it’s very obvious by the end of the film that Denis isn’t interested in such trivialities. In the real, cold world we live in, monsters aren’t killed by an angry mob, or by sunlight, or by the police. They die slowly and gruesomely as the pain of their loneliness and the gravity of their terrible actions gnaws at them until there’s nothing left except a body without a soul. They’ll roam the valleys and the city streets, forever doomed to a life of torture that’s inflicted on themselves as much as it is on others, until there’s nothing left to capture, control, and feast upon. There isn’t any sort of curse put upon them or any supernatural explanation for it: some people just have a certain sickness, one that makes them as dead as others are alive.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon