Trouble Every Day
About the event
New Restoration “A hypnotic, unsettling work by one of the most sensuous filmmakers of the past 25 years … This initially castigated movie fits in with the tantamount themes that have dominated Denis’s work since Beau travail: madness, desire, and power.” Melissa Anderson, Village Voice Claire Denis’s polarizing erotic shocker, a tale of devouring sexual desire, scandalized Cannes and became a defining work of New French Extremity, that transgressive brand of arthouse cinema born of the new century. Buffalo ’66’s Vincent Gallo and Betty Blue’s Béatrice Dalle star as unfortunates afflicted with a condition that turns carnal hunger into, literally, hunger for flesh. He’s an American honeymooning in Paris. She’s a Frenchwoman married to a doctor (Alex Descas). Denis’s only foray into horror to date, Trouble Every Day is an outré meeting of art and splatter film named after a song from Frank Zappa’s album Freak Out. The visceral cinematography is by Agnès Godard; the haunting score is by British chamber-pop band Tindersticks. Denis has credited Jeff Wall’s photography as inspiration for the film—it is, as she frames it, an “homage” to the Vancouver artist. In French and English with English subtitles Advisory: Trouble Every Day includes a scene of sexual violence. “[An] inimitable horror film … Denis shoots this grisly-erotic roundelay in her distinctively woozy and elliptical style … The groggy atmosphere, aided immeasurably by Agnès Godard’s grainy cinematography and the punch-drunk score of indie-rockers Tindersticks, keeps you constantly beguiled.” Keith Uhlich, Time Out
