Trouble Every Day

Claire Denis's film is chi-chi gutter-crawling of the kind that only the French can do and will elicit praise or derision depending on one's appetite for this style of thing.

Shane (Vincent Gallo, the most unlikely looking drug company rep you'll ever come across) is honeymooning with his new bride, June (Tricia Vessey), in Paris. Well, so it seems. What he is really doing is looking for Dr Léo Semeneau (Alex Descas), a research scientist with whom he used to work with and whose unorthodox experiments involved the dark recesses of the libido. Shane has opened the door to the darkness inside and wants to close it before it's too late and wifey becomes his next victim.

Self-consciously provocative in gracing the B grade horror film (needless to say the film is closer to Paul Schrader's Cat People than the classic original) with elliptical Gallic chic (the casting of Dalle as the doctor's cannabalistic wife pretty much says it all in this respect) it will probably arouse film studies students accustomed to theoretical flights of fancy on the abject, the perverse and the monstrous and other fashionable academic preoccupations. Less masochistic types will find, for all its stylishness, in no small measure due to Agnès Godard's photography, little to reward in its morbidly self-indulgent posturing.

 

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