About the film
- Directed by
- Claire Denis
- Released
- July 11, 2001
- US theatrical
- November 30, 2001
- Certification
- NR
- Country
- France, Japan, Germany, Luxembourg
- Starring
- Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas, Florence Loiret Caille
More credits
- Language
- English, French
- Origin
- FR
- Studios
- Messaoud/a Films, Rezo Productions, ARTE France Cinéma, Dacia Films, Kinétique
- Written by
- Jean-Pol Fargeau, Claire Denis
- Produced by
- Jean-Michel Rey, Georges Benayoun, Philippe Liégeois
- Cinematography
- Agnès Godard
- Music
- Stuart A. Staples, David Boulter
- Also starring
- Nicolas Duvauchelle, Raphaël Neal, José Garcia, Hélène Lapiower, Marilú Marini
- Box office
- $9,200
At the 2001 Cannes screening, two audience members reportedly fainted, ambulances were called, and others walked out. The director had made a career of tender, sensory filmmaking. This time she pointed that same sensitivity at appetite and rot.
TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001) follows newlyweds Shane and June Brown, played by Vincent Gallo and Tricia Vessey, arriving in Paris on their honeymoon. Shane is hiding a disease that turns desire into something lethal, and he has come looking for a doctor, Léo, played by Alex Descas, whose own wife Coré, played by Béatrice Dalle, suffers from the same affliction and has to be locked away between attacks.
Claire Denis directed from a script she wrote with longtime collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau. Agnès Godard, Denis’s regular cinematographer, shot the film, and the score is by Tindersticks, whose long partnership with Denis gives the horror the texture of grief rather than spectacle. The film moves at the pace of dread rather than shock, lingering on skin and hunger until the two become impossible to separate.
Dalle’s performance as Coré is feral and mournful at once, a woman aware of what she is becoming and unable to stop it. The film arrived at Cannes to disgust and fascination in equal measure, and it has since become a touchstone of what critics called the New French Extremity, more interested in the body’s betrayals than in scares.
Sources
- TROUBLE EVERY DAY www.filmfest-muenchen.de
- Oberlin College Libraries / Any Format obis.oberlin.edu
- Trouble every day [videorecording] / Tartan Video ; a film by Claire Denis. library-search.iadt.ie
- BBC - Films - interview - 28 October 2014 www.bbc.co.uk
- Trouble Every Day | FACETS facets.org
- BBC - Gloucestershire Films - | Trouble Every Day (2002) www.bbc.co.uk
- PRETENTIOUS PEOPLE-EATERS SURE TO TURN YOUR STOMACH - PRETENTIOUS PEOPLE-EATERS SURE TO TURN YOUR STOMACH www.nydailynews.com
- Although *Inside* and *Martyrs* certainly do not hold any punches in their excruciating (bordering on exhausting) repres repository.library.carleton.ca
- Trouble Every Day bampfa.org
- Claire Denis as horror director - Claire Denis as horror director mc2.dlib.nyu.edu
- Twenty years of Trouble Every Day (2001) liverpooluniversitypress.blog
- Charlie Brownlee- Trouble Every Day (2001) Review: Claire Denis’ Horror Romance is a Gory, Polarizing Portrait of Carnal aspectfilmjournal.web.unc.edu
How to see Trouble Every Day (2001)
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Also available internationally
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Source: JustWatch
Physical media
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Who are these people who faint at Cannes? Is it always the same two people every year? Or people in from the wilderness who have never been to a cinema before, yet inexplicably get tickets to Cannes? Or maybe they’re just festival revellers who fall asleep from too much partying, and then PR types spin it as «fainting»? It’s a mystery. Somebody ought to make a film about it…
Christopher Slind Nicholson it’s the same bunch that can applaud for twenty minutes.
Were those people who walked out aware that the movie they were watching was supposed to be a…horror?
Weird, I was thinking of this film, while watching Glazer’s Under the Skin, a few minutes ago. Perhaps it’s time to watch my disc of this classic film again. So Cronenbergian. 🖤
It is a cool idea and a very well made film but I could not get past the mechanics of biting someone to death.
Beatrice Dalle always playing crazy pants. She does it well enough to make me scared of ever meeting her.
TROUBLE EVERY DAY is definitely an outlier in its graphic extremity, but saying Denis was known for “tender” films is a wild mischaracterization, I think. I CAN’T SLEEP centers around a serial killer, NO FEAR NO DIE is set in the world of cockfighting, and BEAU TRAVAIL is a take on the murderous jealousy of a Foreign Legionnaire (loosely based on Billy Budd). She’s way more prickly than tasteful.