Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

There is a certain vulgar pleasure in occasionally viewing a grotesque film. It certainly offers the viewer a break from the usual and often mundane screen fare. We should all thank our lucky producers for such work as “Angel Heart,” “Silence of the Lambs” and “Reservoir Dogs.” But edgy, risqué or even raunchy films are one thing: incoherent, foundering and solipsistic frauds are an entirely different matter (see anything by Jean-Luc Godard). “Trouble Every Day” (the title in itself is a non-sequitur) is a film of the latter category. But I suppose stumbling unwittingly into a cruel, hateful and miserable film such as this is the price one pays for being a willing audience for alternative cinema. I try not to make a habit out of it.

The film opens with trucker who has pulled his rig over to assist a woman who appears to be having a spot of car trouble. They exchange knowing glances, we suspect a rendezvous. It is only later that evening when a motorcyclist drives up and notices the abandoned automobiles that we begin to suspect something untoward has happened. The rider searches an adjacent field, discovers the bloody and lifeless body of the trucker, then locates the equally bloody but physically unharmed woman cowering in the weeds. It appears as if the motorcyclist had been expecting this to happen.

Our next scene is in an airliner as it approaches Paris with a young couple about to celebrate their honeymoon. She is young and lovely, he is disheveled and pasty. She wants to cuddle on their long flight; he gets up and locks himself in the bathroom to take a pill. They take a room in a hotel. She is ecstatic in her love for him. He eyes the chambermaid.

As events sloppily unfold, the motorcyclist is Leo (Alex Dascas), a French physician. The American newlywed is Shane (Vincent Gallo), a researcher with a major drug company. He is also attempting to confer with Leo during his say in Paris. A few years prior to this the two of them were colleagues conducting field research in the Amazon basin. There they discovered a miracle compound that can be applied as an analgesic, a soporific and—most important of all—as a pencil sharpener for the libido. (The audience only learns this spotty bit of information about these two men about a forty minutes into the film from a quick glance at Shane’s laptop computer screen when his bored and neglected wife flips it open to amuse herself with some innocent snooping). But Leo and Shane have been impatient, and have decided to fly in the face of medical protocol and conduct human experiments with this wonder drug. For Leo, the subject is his wife. Shane appoints himself his own human guinea pig.

But the true effect of this miracle compound involves much more than an enhanced sexual drive. The newly hypersensitive libido is not satisfied with just heightened sexual arousal: it quite literally compels an individual into devouring their sexual prey in a horrible, screaming bloodbath conducted in great solemnity to the strains of a heartrending musical score. This explains the need for Leo to keep his wife under lock and key. It also explains why Shane refuses to consummate his marriage with his new wife June (Tricia Vessey); opting instead to rush off to the bathroom and—forgive me here—finish the job himself in a scene that was both incredulous and unnecessary.

Continuing with this ponderous plot, Leo’s wife—already having killed the trucker—strikes again when two hapless home invaders come a-calling, dispatching one of them. Shane holds his water, even after his wife suspects what would happen to her if they actually did make love. But not one to be left out of the party completely, Shane finally follows the fetching and willing chambermaid down to the locker room (the still photo used in the advertisement) and proceeds to seduce then disassemble this hapless girl. And this, dear readers, is what constitutes the dénouement for this monstrosity of a film.

But Leo and Shane never meet; though Shane does enter Leo’s house soon after the break-in (but before his fatal tryst with the chambermaid) and manages to kill Leo’s wife. (And why so? was it a mercy killing? and if he were that concerned about the obvious dangers of the medication he would surely have stopped gobbling it down at every turn). And after literally wiping his hands from his sexual murder of the chambermaid Shane smiles at his wife, and they to wing off back home, hand in hand. And if the viewer blinked more than once they would have missed most of these plot angles.

I am usually not a squeamish viewer. Even difficult scenes, such as the ear-severing episode in “Reservoir Dogs;” the shooting scene in “Taxi Driver;” and even the murders in “Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer” can be viewed with equanimity, given that these horrific acts were portrayed contextually. But this film fails miserably at every turn; never justifying the graphic cruelty of watching sexual partners scream and flail in the throws of agony for what feels to us, the viewers, like an eternity.

Nothing was resolved in this film. Nothing expiated for all the Jeckyl-like manipulation of nature. Does Leo finally succeed in isolating the wonder substance in this killer compound? And before that happens, will Shane inevitably rend June’s flesh from her bones just for the sake of getting his drug-crazed rocks off? I don’t know whether to commend or condemn the audience with whom I viewed this film—certainly not exempting this hapless chair filler—for sitting quietly and enduring this sort of abuse with the vain hope that something actually meaningful might eventually have happen in this film. Fat chance. Whatever thoughts were running through the mind of the director Claire Denis during this production can only be speculated. But I have not viewed such misanthropic and self-mysogynizing dreck since “Baise Moi.”

Not to make too fine a point here, but I am quite willing to be startled, shocked and even saddened in a film—but only when it is contextually necessary to do so. Nothing energizes the art of filmmaking more than manipulative and innovative work. I’ll endure and even admire an honest failure (Natural Born Killers). But no filmmaker should presume to portray unmitigated cruelty just for the sake of cheap shock value, in lieu of coherent scripting and competent direction. I will metaphorically rip any filmmaker’s head from their shoulders if they dare enact a fraud upon me, and attempt to “entertain” me with dramatized acts of barbarism that mimic the actions of starved swine. This film was neither a libidinous romp nor a nymphomaniacal treat as the professional shills masquerading as film reviewers suggested it was in the advertising. “Trouble Every Day,” (subscripted) ‘A shocking new film by Claire Denis’ is an obscenity. My stomach was turned and my seven and a half-dollars stolen from me. Don’t make this same mistake.


Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age