Directed by Claire Denis. Written by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
Vampires are as enduring in pop culture as they are in lore, and you wonder if much more can be said or shown about these creatures who traffic in blood, lust, seduction and sexual assault. They’re timeless that way. The transposing of sexual predation to actual predation has never gone out of fashion, because, let’s face it, sexual predation never had a stake driven through its heart and continues to cast its shadow over society like a fanged hand.
With Trouble Every Day, however, Claire Denis does the unexpected, and with her trademark sensuality and a non-trademark conjuring of the grotesque, offers a distinct vampire revamp that’s let down by flimsy storytelling at best. The movie justifies itself with the former, fails to due to the latter, then leaves off with little to show for it.
Two stories run parallel and brush up against each other. In one, Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and June Brown (Tricia Vessey), newlyweds, arrive in Paris for their ostensible honeymoon. I say ostensible because they’re surprisingly distant with each other, with Shane sulking most of the time and shy to the touch of June, who’s an ingenue to Shane’s world-weary morosity. Their Paris trip is not all pleasure, as Shane says he has some work to do as well, visiting a lab that’s trying to map out the entirety of the brain.
The glitz of the Brown’s hotel suite stands in contrast to the pallor on the outskirts of town where Léo (Alex Descas) has trouble keeping his wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle) from gorging on men incapable of staying clear of her. Locking her up in their ramshackle house while he continues his research into her condition seems futile. Léo and Shane might be looking for the same thing, but they, and we, must keep looking, for the story doesn’t go much further, let alone resolve.
Trouble Every Day is a slow burn in the vein of Denis’ other great works, but where masterpieces like White Material or Chocolat are electrified by their dense thematic payload, and Beau Travail has rigor to its methods, this foray into genre territory feels slack and lost outside its treatment of some vampire tropes and revitalization of others.
Much of that is down to the glue-and-popsicle-stick storylines that just barely hold the movie together, providing a tedious trail that only lead to a few striking moments, but story-driven is not how I’d describe any of Denis’ movies. What is left unsaid usually provides a livewire current in Denis’ movie, but Trouble Every Day seems to have nothing at all to say.
The movie features seven characters who can be said to drive the story, but five of them are placeholders who somehow made it from the first draft to the screen. The remaining two, Shane and Coré, provide, at times, visceral interpretations of the vampire myth that provide real terror, but these two boats are still stuck on the low tide.
What performances, though. Béatrice Dalle turns feral, and one scene in particular is so unsettling, so wrenching that both your body and mind recoils. Denis mutilates the viewer with how she turns a person’s body into agonized meat, and Dalle’s transformation into something subhuman makes you feel trapped in your seat. Great horror movies make you hold your breath because you’re scared the monster might hear you and Trouble Every Day does reach that frenzied state for a brief spell.
Trouble Every Day does still boast Claire Denis, who clearly hasn’t forgotten how to shoot a movie. She retains her sense for the sensuous and ability to evoke the charge that can exist between two people. She even turns that ability on us, terrorizing us when she tears that intimacy asunder. It’s cinematic alchemy and raw talent that elevates everything it puts its mind to, and it’s therefore a shame that there isn’t more to elevate in this story of vampiric woe, because a few shocking and powerful scenes don’t make a full picture.
Mikkel Frederiksen 