Truism of the day: The very fact that you can't get hold of something always makes it attractive, no matter its content, theme or--potentially--execution. That's what we really mean, whenever we call a film "transgressive" (quite possibly the most over-used critical term of the new Millennium, short as it's been thus far). Frankly, I'd been planning to write about another film entirely this month...but then I walked into Toronto's own Suspect Video, and asked--off-hand, appropos of nothing much--"you wouldn't happen to have a copy of Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY, would you?"

They did. On video, copied from a PAL original. Slightly pixilated and soft around the edges, as though it had been taped from late-night TV off stolen cable. This film I'd hitherto only heard described, usually by people bent on telling me all the reasons I probably didn't want to see it. Which, naturally, only made me want to see it MORE...

Well, I've seen it now. And in this particular case, the hype is very much to be believed.

First off, a word to the wise: Claire Denis is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "horror filmmaker." Her genre, if she was forced to define it, might be best described as "art-house," as aptly proven by the elliptical, interstitial, clinically detached nature of her best-known previous films--I CAN'T SLEEP and BEAU TRAVAIL, respectively. Like Catharine (FAT GIRL) Breillat, her deep interest in the complex emotional savagery underlying most human interaction has also taken her to what the North American censorship machine considers some pretty sexually dicey places.

TROUBLE EVERY DAY is no exception to this trend, with a narrative structure so specific it almost reads like pornography: Like any given classic Universal monster movie, it begins with a honeymooning couple. Drug company exec Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) has brought his na?ve young wife June (Tricia Vessey) to Paris, ostensibly so they can consummate their love in Europe's most romantic city. Unfortunately, Shane doesn't seem to trust himself with the task of keeping up his end of the bargain: In one excruciating scene, he starts making out with June, then literally gets up and runs away once things become hotter and heavier than he feels comfortable with--locking himself in the hotel bathroom, he sits masturbating frantically as June hammers on the door behind him, demanding to know what's wrong.

Through a series of interviews with other French pharmaceutical scientists, we glean that Shane is desperately trying to track down a certain Dr Leo (Alex Descas), who he worked with on a mysteriously non-specific project years earlier. Though we're never told exactly WHAT went wrong during this project's testing phase, we already know that Dr Leo now spends most of his time literally cleaning up after his "very ill" wife, Core (Beatrice Dalle, late of A L'INTERIEUR), who's developed some offputting personal habits: If left unrestrained, she tends to wander away, picking random men up on the highway for sexual trysts which soon turn very, very bad...for the men.

As an after-effect of their mutual experimentation with Things Man Was Not Meant to (Snort/Shoot/Eat/What-Have-You), both Shane and Core suffer from an artificially-created syndrome that has both hyped their sex-drives far beyond the norm and tied them directly to an irresistible impulse to tear apart and devour the objects of their affection. Whenever Shane looks at June, in order to find her "attractive," he must imagine her drenched from head to toe in her own sticky red blood; the deferent gentleness he forces himself to adopt when dealing with her is almost as harrowing as the covetous heat in his stare he directs at the soft flesh of a chambermaid's nape. Meanwhile, Core--boarded into her own bedroom by Dr Leo--takes advantage of a haphazard burglary to entice one handsome thief close enough for her to force herself on him (every young man's dream), then chew off everything she can get at, beginning with his lips and moving far lower (every young man's nightmare).

These are people living in a literal moral twilight. Wikipedia has a name for it: Vorarephilia, the fetish where arousal occurs from the idea of eating--or being eaten by--another. And while Denis may play chilly intellectual games with things like naming feral, near-silent Core after Persephone, reluctant Queen of the Underworld, imprisoned by her overprotective death-god husband...who shared a lover, Attis, with the mother-goddess Cybele, a frenzied sexual icon best-known for worshippers who tore their own genitals off in order to become her permanent consorts...she never shys away from even the most icky mechanics of Shane's struggle to subdue his personal problems, which culminates in a scene that'll make you never want to have (or perform) oral sex again.

TROUBLE EVERY DAY, as a Kinoeye essay has noted, is the closest Denis has yet come to making a true film maudit--graphic, unrelenting, disturbing in its essential incompleteness. I'm glad I saw it, finally; in fact, I want to see it again, at my earliest opportunity. I think I'd like to own it, and watch it the way I occasionally watch other palimpsest films--as something to study, to immerse myself in, a mood. A Maldoror-esque tale of desperate, despairing cruelty, as brilliant and hazy as the reflection of sunset on the Seine. The horror here lies in mood, in moral quandry: What did you DO? Why? What now?

And what, in the end, does that impulse--not to mention the concordant impulse to indulge in it--say about me, or any other similarly-inclined audience member?

TROUBLE EVERY DAY, indeed.

THE END