seen 12th-18th August : Trouble Every Day (2001) [4/10]

Monday, 13 August 2007

TROUBLE EVERY DAY : [4/10] : Fr 01 : Claire DENIS : 101 mins (BBFC)
seen at Gala, Durham : 13th August : public show (£3.00)
   Hard to know what Denis and company had in mind with Trouble Every Day: by the looks of things, the kind of moodily kinky, sexually-charged horror familiar from Harry Kumel's Daughters of Darkness, Tony Scott's The Hunger and Abel Ferrara's The Addiction.
   Trouble is, Denis is clearly far from comfortable with genre trappings, and she can't manage to make them function at the service of her lofty philosophical / psychological / allegorical ambitions. This places an added burden on her two leads, who only meet once during the entire picture: Vincent Gallo as a honeymooning American in Paris with a hidden agenda; Beatrice Dalle as the wife of the scientist he's trying to track down.
   Both Gallo and Dalle have become infected with some kind of experimental libido-virus which, during sex, drives them to bite bloody chunks out of their paramours. He is able to keep a lid on his impulses; she, however, seems to have surrendered herself to them - apparently losing the power of speech in the process.
   Bloody mayhem duly ensues, although it's executed in such a listless and laborious fashion that the picture, while crisply shot and jazzily scored, never comes close to fulfilling the intriguing originality of the basic premise. A suitably haunted/ferocious Dalle keeps things watchable until she exits the narrative roughly two-thirds through - but Gallo is a zone of negative energy throughout, dragging proceedings down whenever his broad, glum moustachioed face fills the screen. 21.8.07

Neil Young

NB
1. all films seen in the UK, and all timings approximate, unless stated otherwise
2. timings taken from the BBFC website are rounded to the nearest minute (i.e. 100min 29sec = 100min, but 100min 30sec = 101min)
3. an asterisk [*] in the rating indicates that film is not a feature (i.e. 0-39m = short; 40m-63m = medium-length; 64m+ = feature)

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