Trouble Every Day (2001)

In Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel wrote about desire as a form of eating. Perhaps that is what Claire Denis had in mind when she made Trouble Every Day, a horror movie that is unlike most other horror movie in dodging silly effects for a strangely haunting story about sexuality. I watched the film a couple of weeks ago, and it's still hard to shrug it off, especially the score by the wonderful group Tindersticks. So what to expect? Trouble Every Day is one of Claire Denis' more open-ended movies. It's quite a task even to describe what the main themes are. It's a film that disturbs and subverts but at the same time it's a strangely alluring affair.

When you think about Paris, do you think about wonderful little alleys and cozy cafés, romance and sunsets? Forget all this, Denis throws you into a gray, cold landscape. Remember what Nicolas Roeg did to Venice in his eerie horror flick Don't Look Now from 1973. Denis film has much in common with that film, it digs and digs, layer after layer, and its digging process requires all of cinema's aspects: how frames are designed, use of close-ups, colors, editing (if there's one dimension of Denis' films I would say are easily overlooked, its how different scenes are juxtaposed in a way that defies linear storytelling). 

Trouble Every Day has the structure and geography of a nightmare, the sort of nightmare when things and places are several things at the same time - that's another reason why the film is so hard to pin down, it doesn't really seem like a film that you could reassemble into a neat package of ideas. A newlywed couple arrives in Paris. The guy is obsessed with looking for a doctor with whom he has collaborated (there are references to unorthodox experiments but we don't know much). A woman coos a string of lovers - and devours them. She is married to the doctor the American man is looking for. The doctor has locked her into his house, but she finds ways to escape. What's going on between these people? There's little dialogue, and plenty of mood. It's rare to see sex depicted so gloomily as it is here: sex is killing, or a desire to kill, to feed on the other, but it is also related to affliction and disease. It's not fun to watch Trouble Every Day, it's not in any sense entertaining (the performances are flat, there is no plot and the violence is not supposed to look cool). But what sort of carnal being are on display here? As in other movies, Denis explores the body, and what she finds there in this film is a strange and sometimes repulsive site for urges, but not urges int the sense of elusive psychological drives - Trouble Every Day leaves almost no room for psychology. At the same time, however, it's also a film about our relations to each other, about fear of hurting one another. But where does the film end up in displaying erotic relations as involving a deep sense of horror and an eerie dimension of pleasure? I was surprised by my reaction to this movie. Instead of being appalled, or shocked, I was moved by the melancholia that the images and the music conveyed. 

 Agnés Godard's cinematography is masterful, as always.