Trouble Every Day (2001), Continued

In Trouble Every Day, the connection between Western intruders and post-colonial indigenous populations is complicated only by June’s interaction with a French-African porter (Bakary Sangare) outside her Paris hotel where she desperately looks for Shane in the pouring rain. In a more positive connection between colonized and colonizer, he offers her an umbrella while she stands drenched and frozen in doubt in the darkness asking her, “Wouldn’t you prefer to wait inside? It is warm.” According to Andrew Asibong, “these moments constitute a radically post-colonial break from the status quo” (158-9). Shane’s interaction with Christelle, however, perpetuates this status quo, reaffirming the exploitation of natives and their resources he and Leo began in Guyana. He seems to render Christelle invisible when she and June make their hotel bed, literally stepping out of the frame. But he gazes at her neck as she walks down a hall, metaphorically colonizing her by fragmenting her body into parts.

The most exploitative consumption in Trouble Every Day, however, is the literal ingestion of human flesh that results from Shane and Leo’s misuse of Guyana’s resources. In visual compositions, the film “gender[s] the land as feminine” (Kolodny, Lay of the Land 8), a gendering that reveals the two sides to a mythology that constructs women and the nature with which they are compared as both nurturing mothers and whores. Both cases, however, suggest women and nature are meant to be exploited, with or without their consent. An opening close-up of a heterosexual couple kissing reinforces the latter construct, for example, especially when it cuts to a setting sun over water and an extreme close-up of Coré’s face that reveals fecund lips and piercing eyes. She retains her role as sexual temptress even after devouring a truck driver. When her husband Leo finds her, he merely hugs her, kisses her forehead, and buries the driver.