In the films of Claire Denis, the brain is just another organ. A filmmaker of a most corporeal sensibility, Denis’ films are jagged and supple, swift and languid, hard and soft as a human body. And the body is her consistent focus across her 30+ features, documentaries, and shorts to date. It is oxygen from the lungs and blood from the heart that keeps the brain alive. Just as it is the brain that determines the actions of the body, and the brain is every bit as real, as physical, as any their part of the body. And, when you can’t trust your brain, you can’t trust your body.
To know oneself and, in so doing, to fear oneself – embrace and repulsion. The contradictions of living form the core, compassionate yet twisted, of Denis’ 2001 film Trouble Every Day. Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June Brown (Tricia Vessey) are American newlyweds honeymooning in Paris. A location chosen by Shane for reasons unbeknownst to his bride.
Their love is gentle, almost cartoonishly sweet. The love of another couple, Core (Béatrice Dalle) and Léo (Alex Descas) is darker, defined by passionate devotion and desperation. Core possesses a seemingly insatiable desire to seduce random men and consume their flesh. Terrifying crimes which Léo dutifully cleans up, barricading Core in a bedroom in their large house for both her safety and that of Paris’ men. The couples share a connection in their past, one which Shane feels an impulse to reignite.
Everywhere in Trouble Every Day, something seems out of place. A fervent, tormented desire within Shane is at odds with the supposed romance of his circumstances. The gentility of the couple’s hotel room, the timidity of his wife and her prim, retro wardrobe, the relaxed placidity of the people around him.
Elsewhere, contradictions continue to abound. A hotel maid washes her feet in a dirty room. Declarations of love are made through gloomy expressions and depressed body language. Blood stains a white wall and brains are sliced open in a sterile clinic. Jarring B-movie theatricality invades a flashback as most scenes play out in informal style. Itself jarring against the rigid formality of the Browns’ interactions with one another.
Those most at peace with themselves, who have accepted themselves and feel no internal repulsion, are also those betrayed the most by a world hostile to their extremes – June and Core. Those, such as Shane, who know themselves yet fear themselves, fit into that world as they wrestle with their private emotional turmoil.
It all reads in their bodies. Denis doesn’t so much position bodies within frames as she finds frames within her actors’ bodies. Their postures and movements tell her story, expose their mental states. And the absence of excessive dialogue prevents any obscuration of the physical language the characters speak so expressively under Denis’ direction.
Their words mean so little. When not utilised for aggressively expository purposes, they typically either belie the characters’ true emotions. Or describe what’s already quite apparent about them. Dialogue exchanges are stilted, sometimes further so through a language barrier. Physical exchanges are much more lucid, and the more so the more physical they are.
When bodies meet in Trouble Every Day, in sexual and violent interactions, both violently sexual and sexually violent, Denis is lucid not just about her characters’ true intentions but also about her own. She portrays love as consumptive. Like a virus that invades another’s body to ingest and destroy it. Though it’s clear that few of these people harbour a coherent, constructive view of what love really is. They’re too troubled by themselves to see those around them accurately. And this lack of clarity leads them to act out in ways both destructive and, ultimately, cathartic.
Trouble Every Day was grossly misunderstood upon release. Deemed a crass, salacious, baffling misfire from a director whose previous feature, Beau Travail, had just drawn her the highest acclaim of her career to date. Upon first viewing, it’s undoubtedly a startling work. Its mundanity and its eccentricities amalgamating into a curious whole that seems to repel deeper investigation.
But that ostensible aloofness is simply part of the wondrous stylistic spell that Denis casts with every one of her films. And those who never saw anything more substantial beneath it in this film have missed out on one of her most fascinating works. This is an incredibly daring film. Brilliant in ways that are tough to detect, let alone describe, and utterly without relation, save within the remarkable canon of Claire Denis.
