Trouble Every Day (2001)

Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day had quite the reception at Cannes in 2001. The festival is known for overwrought European audience reactions - raucous inappropriate laughter, loud boos, and huffing walk-outs. And while there wasn’t much laughter at Denis’ premiere, there was plenty of the latter two. Furious critics shouted obscenities at the screen, and an ambulance had to be called for two women who fainted in the aisles. There was a real hatred of the film from many critics, particularly the European set, but reading it now it seems less like anger at the film itself and more a loss at how to define it — along with a sense of betrayal that one of France’s most promising female filmmakers had sunk so low. Fresh off the success of the classically sensual Beau Travail, Denis had strayed from her lane in more ways than one. Trouble Every Day was a film without a home in terms of genre and cinema politics, and so it was dismissed for years until it became clear the film had helped launch the New French Extremity —  to my mind the most resonant wave of European cinema of the 21st Century.

The film is light on plot and even lighter on exposition. A woman named Coré lures a truck driver into the bushes, where she has sex with him and then brutally murders him. Her husband, Dr. Léo Semenau, arrives on the scene to take her home and clean the blood off her, as if she were a child that had come home covered in mud. Semenau has clearly seen this before, and he locks her in her room and returns to work as a doctor in his home clinic. At the same time, a newlywed couple from the United States lands in Paris for their honeymoon. The husband, Shane, is plagued by visions of his young wife drenched in blood, and his anxiety about this has left marriage thus far unconsummated. He leaves her at the hotel as he searches the city for Semenau. We come to learn that Shane and Semenau had worked together on a research expedition in Guyana, and had experimented on humans — including Coré. Shane has the same affliction, where his lust burns over into a cannibalistic frenzy. So far he’s been keeping his urges under control with drugs and resistance to his wife’s advances. But he knows that won’t last, and so he desperately seeks a cure from Semenau before he hurts his new wife.

I have a more expansive definition of the horror genre than some, and Trouble Every Day fits. The film is a slow burn, especially compared to most American horror, but it drips with anxious dread. There are only a few scenes of blood, but when they come they do not flinch. They linger on frothing animalistic hunger. The film has two of the most shocking scenes of erotic violence I’ve ever seen, one committed by each of those with the affliction, and I can see why critics and audiences recoiled at Denis’s naturalistic depiction of savagery. French cinema was tipping into a new era of millennial nastiness that would later produce films like Irreversible, Twentynine Palms, Inside, and Martrys. These films of the New French Extremity were linked by an unflinching portrayal of violence - often against women — and also by themes of violence as an eternal extension of man’s condition within a state of Nature. The New French Extremity, as it came to be called, was a wave of nightmares of a very human sort, nothing supernatural or animal except for the animal that dwells within us. The savagery is always there waiting to be triggered, whether by lust, vengeance, envy, or zealotry. All it takes is a push.

The push in Trouble Every Day is some form of pharmaceutical testing of a libido drug that goes too far. But the bloody results are still at the outer edge of an extant continuum with regard to human sexuality. Some of the critics that lashed out at Denis sensed within the film an apprehension about the Sexual Revolution. The second half of the 20th Century had seen myriad taboos and barriers pertaining to sex bent or destroyed, with France often being on the cutting edge. The sexual excesses of the West found fertile ground in French urban intellectual culture, and figures like Michel Fucout publicly pushed legislation that would legalize sex with minors. In the wake of the 70s and 80s, female conservative leaders in France decried what they called a “Tyranny of Pleasure” wherein women had not really achieved sexual liberation, but had rather exchanged the old limitations for a new suite of social pressures and anxieties that lauded carnal enthusiasm and availability at the expense of safety and healthy relationships. Violence against women had actually increased as a more chaotic sexual marketplace led to more lustful extremes. This era also marked the beginning of France’s population plunge as family formation fell apart — hardly a situation unique to the French, but one that has contributed directly to their current immigration crisis and economic stagnation.

I don’t know if Denis had any political aims with the film, but as with any worthwhile work of art, it places a finger in the water and gives you some sense of the current. Like other films of the New French Extremity, it was caught in the middle between conservative viewers that decried its violence and traditional cineasts that considered it gauche and reactionary. In his essay “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” critic James Quandt claimed the film and those of its ilk constituted an artistic “retreat from the social” wherein filmmakers had fled from social and political commentary that engaged with contemporary issues, and had instead turned inward toward the primal. But in an age of Deconstruction, the primal is exactly what you’ll find when you strip those old structures away. Such is the cycle of civilizations. You forget how things were built, lose the ability to maintain them — and then the walls get painted in blood.

Much of civilization is the construction of barriers — the restriction of instinct — built on an understanding that unfettered human urges can drag us back to the dark.

The eternal, by definition, is always contemporary.