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The cult of family, I suspect, is responsible for a great deal of the wickedness in this world. So many things that are done for family—that noblest and most totalizing of causes—must necessarily be done at the expense of the family of man. Let Detroit rot, so long as the next generation’s legacy is safe in Grosse Pointe! This is what makes Claire Denis’ new film, Bastards, in which the blind obeisance to a network of family loyalties leads to mutually assured destruction, so bracingly contemporary. (Denis, however, was quick to correct me on this point when we spoke earlier this week, saying: “I don’t think it’s contemporary. It’s already well, well treated in the Greek tragedy, and in the Bible.”)
Bastards is far from Denis’ first meditation on family; even in films that don’t directly address the subject, like 1999’s Beau Travail, it’s arguably the structuring absence. As I note in the above interview—and as Andrew Tracy further articulates in his indispensable take at Reverse Shot—Bastards might very well be a companion piece to Denis’ 2008 film 35 rhums, for both deal in family ties that bind, although only in Bastards do those ties become a garrote.
Denis is attracted to polarities, and she has a tendency to revisit or reconsider similar material as seen through different prisms, light and dark. Take, for example, the back-to-back releases of Trouble Every Day (2001) and Vendredi soir (2002). The former, which today begins a weeklong run at BAMcinématek, deals in glancing sexual encounters with fatal outcomes. The latter is built around a no-strings-attached one night stand that blows by like a zephyr, with so little permanent consequence that, were it not for an impulsive, expensive gift-giving at the conclusion, it might very well be the idle fantasy of a woman stuck in traffic.
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The woman (Valerie Lemercier) is preparing to move in with her boyfriend when, crawling through Parisian gridlock created by a transit strike, she impulsively picks up a stranger who’s looking for a ride (Bastards’ lead Vincent Lindon). Perhaps “no-strings-attached” isn’t the right phrase, for sex isn’t entirely without potential repercussions here. Aside from Catherine Breillat, I don’t know of another filmmaker who’s been as explicit as Denis about showing the use of condoms—before a particularly ravenous encounter with Chiara Mastrionni in Bastards, Lindon has the presence of mind to pop a prophylactic from his pocket and sheath up. But Vendredi soir would appear to endorse the words of the philosopher George Clinton: “You can’t miss what you can’t measure.” There’s no harm in this dalliance. While nothing suggests that there will be a sequel to the evening, and while we may presume that the Lemercier character still has every intention of moving in with her boyfriend, the last glimpse of her ecstatic face assures us that this stolen spree of private pleasure will be no cause for morning-after regret.
Trouble Every Day is likewise a film with sex on the brain, but all the latex in the world is no protection against its carnivorous, frequently terminal encounters. Though then still living in Ohio, I happened to be visiting New York City in the spring of 2002 when Trouble Every Day was having what couldn’t have been more than a weeklong run. It was playing, as noted in a recent write up by the redoubtable Melissa Anderson, at the Quad, which I did not know at the time was the worst movie theater in Manhattan, if not the entire United States. It wouldn’t have mattered if it’d been playing in a disused lavatory, for I was nailed into my seat by the first images: A couple in a parked car, gnashing their mouths together, tangling tongues; the reflections of lamplights on the waters of the Seine, glowing like molten gold and silver. On the soundtrack, Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples croons in his crushed velvet baritone: “When you look in my eyes/ You see trouble every day…” Once the movie was over, I walked to a bar a few doors down, ordered a double of whiskey, then went right back and watched it again.
Trouble Every Day is structured around the parallel narratives of two afflicted couples. Coré (Béatrice Dalle) is introduced wearing a long olive Army jacket over a little black dress, standing on the side of a motorway in an overcast Parisian suburb at the chilly end of day. With a sharp, trembling smile that speaks unmistakably of naked need, she flags down a passing truck driver. Later that night, when Coré’s husband, Léo (Alex Descas), catches up with her, her mouth is smeared with telltale gore. The driver is laid out in a patch of waste ground, mauled and dead and grinning obscenely, his upper lip gone. Léo’s collected, pragmatic response suggests that this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. Later we’ll watch Léo stifle his own desire to wrangle his way out of Coré’s embrace, for reasons we can only guess at. Meanwhile, a newlywed American couple, Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia Vessey), touch down in Paris for their honeymoon, conferring together in thin, soft voices that are like a matching His and Hers set. Once installed in their hotel suite, though, they repeatedly fail to do what couples on honeymoons are famous for doing, even after much preliminary pawing. Despite June’s responsiveness and Shane’s obviously vexing hard-on, he panics whenever they come to the brink of consummation. It must be something to do with the vision of his blood-spattered bride that visited Shane on the plane—or the bite mark that still shows clearly on June’s upper arm.
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Why all of this anguished, self-inflicted blue-balling? Per Antonioni, Eros is sick all right. Shane and Coré share the same affliction—she at a considerably advanced stage. Whomever they fuck, they are compelled to eat. It’s the curse of Cat People—the act of intimacy or physical arousal causes one to turn into a ravening monster. Because Coré can’t sate her desire for the man that she loves without killing him, she instead goes cruising, screwing and eating pick-ups who she treats as interchangeable, disposable. Shane fights the same urges, the same conflict. Like Vendredi soir, Trouble Every Day isn’t just about sex, it’s specifically about the thrilling license of anonymous sex—here cannibalism fills in for just about any perversion that you could think of. This isn’t science fiction. The compartmentalizing that Coré and Shane are forced to engage in, suggesting the incompatibility of sex and tender, intimate love, goes on all over the world, every day.
There was trouble from the outset for Denis’ film. After playing hors compétition at Cannes, where it collected a Prix Très Spécial, Trouble Every Day had its North American debut at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, which was interrupted in its sixth day by the terrorist attacks of September 11th. That August, Denis had already provoked the ire of genre purists by pulling Trouble Every Day from the 2001 London FrightFest Film Festival because she didn’t want it being tagged a horror movie—it was replaced, at the last minute, by the Canadian werewolf picture Ginger Snaps. Talking of the theme of incest in Bastards, Denis decried this “metaphor of the human condition” being reduced to “vulgar material,” and one supposes she did not want her use of cannibalism confused with, say, Umberto Lenzis.
The reviews didn’t help matters. While not particularly caring for the film, The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman predicted Trouble Every Day’s future as a film maudit with typical clairvoyance. Most damningly, The Times assigned the review to Stephen Holden. Despite Denis’ best efforts to avoid labeling, the film had the subsequent misfortune of being lumped in under the belittling rubric of ‘New French Extremity,’ as though it were somehow of a piece with, say, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s hardcore Bonnie & Bonnie home video Baise-moi (2000). The same fate greeted worthy works like Intimacy (2001) by Patrice Chéreau, who died on this week. (If Chéreau hadn’t gotten to the title Intimacy first, Denis might’ve done just as well with it for her film.) While the tag ‘French Extremity’ was meant as a pejorative, it has since, like “Yankee Doodle,” became a rallying cry. This Fall, Trouble Every Day will play in a program at New York’s Museum of Art and Design with the mock-provocative title ‘J’Adore Violence: Cinema of the New French Extremity.’
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The things that first come to mind when I think of Trouble Every Day, however, have nothing to do with extremity. I think of dusks and dawns on the Seine. Of Shane and June’s first appearance, pressed against the window of an international flight—“I think those lights are Denver,” he says, before a cut to a Lite-Brite constellation that looks as no city has ever looked from the sky. Of June’s lime green scarf being snatched off of the ramparts of Notre Dame by a breeze, then followed as the wind rolls it about over the roofs of Paris. Of the maid at the posh hotel where Shane and June are staying, seen surreptitiously as she washes her feet in a sink. In moments like this, the movie has an ineffable way of reminding one of how the lurking potential for sex infuses everyday activities, of the bodies beneath clothes.
The actors give themselves wholly to the scrutiny of Denis and her right-hand DP Agnès Godard. Gallo is perhaps the least feasible man of science ever put on the screen, but this scarcely matters. He has adopted the look of Poe in his famous post-suicide-attempt portrait, which suits the film’s discreetly 19th century air, and he has those china-blue eyes, cast down to stare at pale Vessey’s dark pubic bush, submerged in a haze of milky bathwater. Bodies become panoramic vistas; the mole on Dalle’s left breast assumes the significance of a landmark. For her broad, carnal mouth with dents du bonheur gap-teeth, the actress has been nicknamed La Grand Bouche, and that gueule has a starring role here. Cooing and cuddling one minute, she sets about piranha-like snapping and clacking the next, her live-wire tongue searching for any aperture to enter. Cocaine-skinny, she’s pure impulse, raw sensation. Dalle has a wonderful moment when she opens her jacket while on an overgrown ridge waiting for her next victim, spreading her arms like bat wings, and you can tell that even the stiff breeze is enough to turn her on. Special notice is due to the quiet, firm presence of Florence Loiret-Caille, playing the maid who attracts Shane’s attention with her purple eyeshadow, lank brown hair, pretty-plain prole face, and sulky overbite. (Loiret-Caille has since worked with Denis in Vendredi soir and Bastards, as the pregnant girlfriend of Gregoire Colin’s pimp.)
Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau’s typically spare script makes minimal gestures towards explaining the condition that afflicts both Shane and Coré. Shane is identified as an employee of “Universal PharmaCon,” which sounds like what you’d get when a couple of corporations from Cronenberg movies merger. Shane had previously been on the periphery of a breakthrough that Léo was pursuing in Guyana, where the infection occurred, and where Shane recognized some kind of mutual attraction with Coré. “You were in love with her?” a lady scientist asks him. “It’s not the right word for it…” he replies. These scenes feel like a child’s idea of what goes on in a laboratory, full of distracted cutaways to shakers and centrifuges that underscore the sense of constant agitation, and talk of “Mapping out the human brain,” which apparently has something to do with slicing up gray matter like so much pate.
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That opening scene—beginning with an anycouple who are never seen again in the course of the film—subverts this bare-bones exposition, removing the events of Trouble Every Day from a specific science-gone-awry story and placing them in the context of the universal. The film shares its title with a Mothers of Invention song about in-the-streets sixties upheaval from their debut album Freak Out!, though I’ve yet to see any persuasive linkage between song and film. The trouble that Denis speaks of is sexual ache, capable of being a hectoring, insistent, and unpleasant thing even when you’re not carrying a vampiric virus. To quote Luis Buñuel, late in life: “If the devil were to offer me a resurgence of what is commonly called virility, I’d decline.”
Who better to provide accompaniment to this drama than Tindersticks, a band whose lyrical skeeviness I’ve admired since at least their third album, 1997’s Curtains. (Samples: “When the cab ride ahead seems too long/ We go fuck in the bathroom”; “I’ve been out all night/ Get in at dawn/ And I’ve still got honey/ Dripping from my claws.”) The sung theme bookends the film, though there’s musical accompaniment throughout, including persecuting horns that recall Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver score. I once asked Tindersticks’ Dickon Hinchliffe, who handled the band’s brass and strings arrangements, about this, and he confirmed the primary importance of Herrmann. (Hinchcliffe alone is credited with the Vendredi soir soundtrack, though he subsequently left the band sometime after 2003’s Waiting for the Moon.) The exchange in question took place roughly ten years and a half dozen PCs ago, for I liked Trouble Every Day so much and felt so alone in this that I actually solicited interviews to try to write about it; the movie, then, may be said to have directly inspired my first mewling, puking attempts at polemicizing. The result, since lost to the sands of time, would be my “audition” a year later when I applied to contribute to the nascent Reverse Shot. Around the same time, co-founder Jeff Reichert would write with eerie prescience that “Ten years from now, the planet will be awakened by the sound of film critics the world over slapping themselves in unison and wondering how they managed, en masse, to miss the boat on this one.”
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If there hasn’t been a widespread mea culpa ten years later, the critical consensus has shifted. Yes, Trouble Every Day has aged well, in everything except for its credits font. (I think it’s the same one used for the University of Manchester Press’ French Film Directors series. My friend Justin Stewart tells me it’s called Tekton Pro BoldCond? Horrible.) The timing for a re-release couldn’t be better, for it complements Denis’ latest, which likewise draws its theme out onto the furthest possible precipice of conclusion—if incest is the essence of family in Bastards, cannibalism is the essence of raw sex in Trouble Every Day.
Both films also share a conviction that the less well connected and calculating always seem to wind up as collateral damage. Shane, after wrestling with his urges, finally caves in and corners Loiret-Caille’s maid near the employee lockers. Their confrontation is, for a moment, a dance of consent given and withdrawn, but it finally ends as it must, with rending and tearing. Love isn’t the right word for it. June returns to the suite shortly afterwards, to discover a downy puppy on the carpet, the first of what will undoubtedly be many gifts from Shane, apologies for what he has done, or what he cannot do to her. Her husband, who’s come home with something dripping from his claws, is in the bathroom, cleaning the carnage off of himself. June enters as a few telltale beads of blood are travelling down the shower curtain. Her eyes are the last image in the film, and they pose a question. Will Shane and June create a tacit “arrangement,” as so many couples do, and as Léo and Coré did? Will he be allowed to relieve his hunger by feasting on lower-class menials that no one will miss much anyways? It’s a moment of indecision, a question left hanging. Her eyes are open… but what has she allowed herself to see?
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.