Trouble Every Day
dir. Claire Denis
Opens Fri March 22
at the Varsity.

The German literary critic Walter Benjamin famously called Paris the capital of the 19th century. For him, the 20th century (or the early part of the 20th century--he died in 1940) was awakening from the deep sleep that was the 19th century. The capital of that slumber was Paris, whose arcades (the predecessor of the department store and mall), commodities, railroad stations, and other civil phenomena "play[ed] the role of the subconscious." Paris was not only the City of Lights, but also the "dream city."

"Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces," Benjamin wrote in The Arcades Project. To understand Claire Denis' extraordinary new film, Trouble Every Day, Benjamin's reading of the 19th century must be utilized. For one, the film is about the "reactivation of mythic forces" by the forces of capitalism and science--the central preoccupations of the 19th century. But also at work in this film is the figure of Charles Baudelaire, the 19th-century French poet who was at the heart of Benjamin's Arcade Project.

The Paris of Trouble Every Day is the Paris darkly detailed in Baudelaire's collection of poems called Les Fleurs du Mal (Evil Flowers). "The deafening street was howling round my head, lofty slender, in majestic mourning black"; "The charm that enraptures, the pleasure that kills"; "Lightening! Then night!--Your fugitive beauty." These poetic but nightmarish fragments from Les Fleurs du Mal find their photographic translation in Trouble Every Day, which was shot by Agnès Godard, who has photographed all of Denis' important films. Along with the similarities between Trouble Every Day and Baudelaire's satanic poems (Paris as hell, as the fallen city) is the remarkable likeness of the main character, Shane (Vincent Gallo), to Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems and horror stories were admired and translated into French by Charles Baudelaire.

Shane--a scientist who is afflicted with a fictional disease that approximates the real venereal disease that wasted Charles Baudelaire--flies to Paris for his honeymoon with his girlish wife, June (Tricia Vessey), whose appearance approximates the girl Edgar Allan Poe married in 1836 (she was 13, he was 27). Once in Paris, Shane starts to search for his double: a black doctor by the name of Léo (the great Alex Descas), whom he worked with in some mysterious research project in the jungles of South America. Léo is a fallen doctor; his line of research was deemed unscientific by the science community and he was expelled from its noble ranks. He is now a lowly general practitioner. Léo's wife, Coré (Béatrice Dalle), is a highway vampire who lures men from the safety of their trucks and automobiles, and, by a grassy roadside that recalls J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island, eats them alive during sex. Her hunger for male flesh is a consequence of the mysterious research conducted by her husband in South America.

LĂ©o locks his vampire wife in a sunless room on the top floor of his decaying house. But while he is away at work, she breaks out of his prison, heads to the highway, and lures men with her evil eyes. The doctor is also conducting strange experiments in the basement--it seems he is trying to find a cure for his wife's affliction. These gothic narratives (descending from Frankenstein, Dracula, "The Fall of the House of Usher," and other sources) are concentrated into one thing that moves, sleepwalker-wise, through the streets of 21st-century Paris.

What is disturbing about this film is not the two controversial gore/porn sequences, which will inevitably split critics' and audiences' opinion of the film, but the fact that it is about a nightmare that essentially has no dreamer. Walter Benjamin's, Charles Baudelaire's, Edgar Allan Poe's 19th-century nightmares had dreamers who could awake and dialectally restore sanity. The sinister cluster of 19th-century horror narratives in Trouble Every Day seems to be activated by an alien energy source within the nightmare rather than the body of a sleeping man or woman.

This lack of a dreamer is emphasized by the absence of a detective. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which is credited as being the first detective story, Trouble Every Day has no detective tracking down these vampire killers. Without a Dupin (the detective in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") or even a Holmes (particularly the Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles) there is no one to deactivate the horror narratives, to remove their mystery and expose it to the light of reason. The nightmare starts without a cause and goes on forever.