Trouble Every Day (2001)
Directed by Claire Denis
Newlyweds Shane and June arrive in Paris for their honeymoon. In the process of trying to find a cure for his strange, bloodthirsty disease, Shane stumbles upon the story of a doctor and his flesh eating wife.
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What critics compared Trouble Every Day to
The filmmaking is accomplished, even inventive in places, and yet for all the obvious effort, it mostly succeeds in reminding us of other, better stabs at similar themes and imagery, including and especially Claire Denis’s 2001 thriller Trouble Every Day , with its nightmarish conflation of death and desire.
Or maybe it is Claire Denis’s body-horror romance of Trouble Every Day that Guadagnino is channelling here.
Claire Denis did something similar with her 2001 French horror Trouble Every Day , and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2017 The Bad Batch chewed that same bone.
From Claire Denis' masterpiece of desire Trouble Every Day to the zom-rom-com Warm Bodies .
Maren’s outpouring additionally fails to resonate because it’s never entirely clear whether Guadagnino and company are trying to make a cold, hollowed-out account of the way this kind of lifestyle erodes the soul as Claire Denis captured in 2001’s Trouble Every Day , or a lovers on the run paean to the secret beauty of the Middle American backwoods.
With films such as Julia Ducournau’s Raw , Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day , and even Antonia Bird’s Ravenous , cannibalism transcends gory spectacle into discussions of consumption, rage, and burning desire.
Previous foreign movies, including Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day and Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are, have attempted similar feats by combining B-grade genre tropes like cannibalism with more upscale filmmaking, though Raw both does that and adds a welcome layer of Hollywood-style polish straight out of Craven or Carpenter.
If not the devilish, post-apocalyptic romp, “Delicatessen” (1991), perhaps Claire Denis’ “Trouble Every Day” (2001) would make a great double bill with “Raw.”
Denis is a filmmaker of the unspeakable, who uses her camera to communicate what cannot be said in words or at all: Trouble Every Day represented the carnivorous consequences of lust via cannibalism; Beau Travail let a frenzied nightclub dance routine speak for a man’s heartbreak and loneliness; and Let the Sunshine In translated Roland Barthes’s “figures” of a lover’s discourse into expressive performances and broken conversations.
He’s a cinephile, and for his key influence, he repeatedly cites the great masters of sensual cinema, and one of the shrewdest observers of modern masculinity, the French master Claire Denis (“Trouble Every Day,” “I Can’t Sleep”).
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Is it an inability to jibe with this new maturity—I have been a son, after all, while I have not been a father—or the old story of the auteurist enthusiast thrown the moment that their favorite varies from an accustomed formula, which I can well remember coloring the receptions of such films as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo (2001), Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), and Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud (2005)?
From The Babadook , It Follows , and Trouble Every Day to recent festival sensations like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and The Eyes of My Mother , the genre’s most inspired new work has taken the characters who once would be victims and given them authority and agency, turning the tables on the men who take their power for granted.
A patchwork of Dario Argento, Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day, and Mary Shelley, Lucky McKee’s May is all gouged eyes and severed limbs, cannibal love and stitched-together monstrosities.
Lucky McKee takes a look at the end of the world and it comes half-blinded before a student version of Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day and a poster-shrine to Dario Argento's Opera .
Indicated by spacious compositions and a bracing unpredictability, Paul Thomas Anderson's romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love is a marriage, if you will, between Claire Denis' audacious Trouble Every Day and Steven Shainberg's sadomasochism fairy tale Secretary --here's a trio of films that announce 2002 as a year perhaps best defined by its aggressively non-traditional, hopelessly romantic love stories (toss Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, Cronenberg's Spider , and Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction into that mix).
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The difference is that where Bastards finds her impressionistic, hyper-tactile aesthetic willfully hemmed in, Trouble Every Day suggests what happens when it’s allowed to run amok.
Titled from Frank Zappa and shown also at the Museum of the Moving Image/MoMI two weeks earlier, Halloween night screening was Trouble Every Day, by Claire Denis, whose New York Film Festival noir Bastards is like to bring her wider recognition.
It may be the darkest film of Denis’ career—which, after her vampiric shocker Trouble Every Day, is saying something.
You can love films by Claire Denis – “Beau Travail” – or hate them – “Trouble Every Day” – or you can feel somewhere in the middle.