Claire Denis’s Paris-centered anti-colonial horror film Trouble Every Day even more explicitly transforms bodies into landscapes. The Wendigo disease has been imported from post-colonial South America after a research expedition led by Dr. Leo Seneneau (Alex Descas). And the disease infects both Leo’s wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle) and an American male colleague, Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo). But the responses to cannibalism are even more gendered in Trouble Every Day than in American Psycho. Whereas Coré must be sacrificed after preying on and devouring several men, Shane remains unpunished, even though he too cannibalizes at least one victim, Christelle (Florence Loiret Caille), a hotel maid. Her interactions with both Shane and his wife June (Tricia Vessey) humanize Christelle, heightening the horror when Shane tortures, murders, and feeds on her flesh; yet because Shane is a respected male doctor, he is free to return home washed clean of guilt. As both victim and perpetrator, Coré must die, perhaps reifying her pleas to Leo: “I can’t wait any longer …. I want to die.”
Although scholarship exploring Trouble Every Day primarily highlights how the film plays with genre[i] and/or style[ii], we see the film as a comment on intruders violating interconnected frontiers. As in American Psycho, the literal cannibalism both Coré and Shane perform in Paris parallels the consumption of resources. This time the exploitation is in Guyana and also serves as the source of their disease. According to a website explanation of Dr. Leo’s bioprospection mission in Guyana, “These samples and analyses should in the near future help us to focus our pharmacological research into nervous diseases, pain, mental diseases, and problems of libido.” The following year, a bulletin article published in Revue of the Association of Neuroscientists explains, “Leo Seneneau has released several studies about botany applied to neuroscience.” And in flashback, we see Leo working in the jungle with a variety of plants. Other flashbacks show Coré and Shane with Leo in his rainforest camp.
[i] See also Met, Phillippe. “Looking for Trouble: The Dialectics of Lack and Excess, Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001). Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film. 3.7 (9 Jun 2003). Web. 3 Jul 2013.
[ii] See also Morrey, Douglas. “Textures of Terror: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day.” Belphegor: Littérature populaire et culture médiatique. 3.2 (Apr 2004). Web. 1 Jul 2013 and Murphy, Ian. “Feeling and Form in the Films of Claire Denis.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. 54 (Fall 2012). Web. 30 Jun 2013.
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