Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, continued

In Denis’s Trouble Every Day, the metaphor of the land as woman is complicated in two ways: Coré becomes both cannibal and cannibalized because her Wendigo disease was forced upon her by Leo and Shane’s experiments with exploited South American resources. And even though he leaves Paris unscathed, Shane too contracts the infection from their post-colonial research. 

Defying the frontier myth, both male and female bodies become landscapes in Trouble Every Day, especially in the film’s two key horrific cannibal scenes. In the first, Coré seduces a neighbor, who breaks into her house and pulls down the boards Leo has hammered across her bedroom door. She teases him first, climbing on top and kissing him. But then her kisses turn into bites, continuing even when he yelps for her to stop. 

The extreme close-ups suggest the intruder’s body is a landscape, with a camera hovering over body parts while she bites and pulls off his flesh. She kisses him as he struggles to breath but pokes his wounds with her fingers and laughs. The approach, as Ian Murphy states, is “anthropological,” with “copulating human bodies registered in an unusual manner: not as clear figurations or distinct forms, but as dislocated swatches that took several moments for a viewer to recognize and identify as muscle, hair, or skin.” The result is a transformation of body into a landscape on which, as Laura U. Marks puts it, Coré, “grazes” (162).