Movie Review by Nigel A. Messenger
Starring: Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Beatrice Dalle, Alex Descas, FlorenceLoiret-Caille
Director: Claire Denis
Cannibalistic sex is essentially the theme of TROUBLE EVERY DAY.
Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his new wife June (Tricia Vessey) are Americans on their honeymoon in Paris. Shane has ulterior motives however as he is using the trip to locate Leo Semeneau (Alex Descas), a fellow scientist who was working on brain research.
Leo is in fact looking after his own wife Core (Beatrice Dalle) who it turns out he has experimented on and who is now ‘ill’. Her illness means that she has the need to have sex and while doing so eat some of her sex partner until they are dead. She finds these victims apparently by escaping from the house where her husband keeps her.
This is essentially the film’s theme as Shane also has the desire to eat his sex partners. He doesn’t have proper sex with his new wife because he doesn’t want to kill her. He does however find time to have sex with and eat the chambermaid at their hotel.
The film has very little dialogue, a bit in English and a bit in French with no subtitles, so I guess the dialogue is supposed to be relatively insignificant.
The sex/flesh eating scenes are bloody and not afraid to show the main three females completely naked in sexual situations. The reason I’m so clinically spelling this out is because while I’m more than happy to look at attractive naked women the only reason behind this film seems to be to get some nudity and gore on screen preferably at the same time.
The lack of dialogue means it is difficult to work out what is going on and the pace of the film is set to crawl speed.
At the beginning of the film there are some shots of coloured lights reflecting in water and a very shaky hand-held pan across the city. This shaky, unprofessional piece of camera work should have been a warning as to the quality of the film together with the character Shane’s dodgy seventies style haircut.
What girl in her right mind would have just got married to somebody with his obvious problems? I also don’t understand while all of the victims while fully conscious and unrestrained could only manage to make some weird noises – a sort of scream/gargle – and not really attempt to properly fight off these cannibal-sex-fiends.
Incidentally for those fans of movie gore mixed with naked girls out there, these scenes could easily be compressed into a ten minute short instead of sitting through an hour and forty-one minutes of thinking ‘what the hell is going on’. The ending is even more of a let down than the rest of the film.
The trouble with TROUBLE EVERY DAY is literally the whole movie.
