"Vincent Gallo is right at home in this French shocker playing his
usual bad boy weirdo role."
A
troublesome and hazy vampirish sex and gore film by esteemed French
director Claire Denis ("I Can't Sleep"/"Beau Travail"), that left more
questions than it answered. Marvelously minimalist and almost devoid of
dialogue (the film felt more like a silent movie). It was deeply puzzling
because it provided merely a threadbare story and no explicit explanation
for what unfolds. Yet it always kept one in a state of captive
anticipation just like the two lost heroines in the story were kept, and
it filled me with the hope that somehow there were pieces to this puzzle
that fit if I kept my eye on the ball. The film's thrust was all in the
sickening and over-the-top bloody cannibalistic images, and in the nature
of the human body used in the search for beauty. It was unnerving to see
in the opening scene the alluring Cor?(Béatrice Dalle) stand in the road
and attract one of those 18-wheeler truck drivers to stop and go into the
woods with her for a quickie, whereby after her ravishing sex drive is
sated she turns to literally devouring him and is covered in his blood
(The lesson might be, beware of easy pickups!). Her scientist research
doctor lover, Léo (Alex Descas), a black man from Guyana, comes to the
wooded spot of the incident and gingerly wipes the blood off her and takes
her back to be imprisoned in the bedroom of their house for her own safe
keeping. In that house is where he also keeps a secret lab to do his novel
experiments on sexuality.
American newlyweds Shane (Vincent
Gallo)
and June Brown (Tricia Vessey) arrive in Paris for their honeymoon and
check into a swank hotel, whereby Shane starts acting odd and keeps
leaving his innocent wife alone without mentioning why. Their marriage
disturbingly remains unconsummated while he masturbates or fails to follow
through on his lovemaking responsibilities. Shane is an ambitious rep for
an American pharmaceutical company, whom we learn made previous contact
with Léo about his controversial research and talked his company into
sponsoring the unauthorized experiments. But when he turns up at Léo's
Paris medical clinic, where a team of scientists are researching the human
libido by mapping out the human brain, to his dismay he finds that the lab
booted the maverick scientist out for his reckless and radical
experiments. One of the scientists cynically says you can probably now
find him on talk radio or making the popular book circuit. When Shane
tracks down the country house where Léo now lives, it soon becomes apparent
that both Cor?and Shane have been subjected to Léo's mad experiments and as
a result have some brain malfunction. Both have had their sex drives
accelerated to such a high point where they can't stop devouring the
object of their sexual urges, and have become modern movie picture
vampires.
The story remains more creepy than poetic or scary or
meaningful or humorous. It's this shocking creepiness about it, as it
leads down a solemn bloody path that makes it so uncompromising and a
grand parody on all such vampire flicks from Nosferatu on. This desperate
mood it sets gives the film its stark otherworld look. It's also helped by
the appropriate sobering music from Tindersticks, and the enchanting
cinematography from Agnès Godard. The suggestion Denis leaves us with is
that modern man in his greed and in his need to compete with others, uses
sex as a weapon that goes out of control even if science can provide for
some remedies. Léo has given both of them capsules to control their rampant
sexual urges, but apparently the capsules don't work or they're not taking
them. Shane believes there is a possible cure, that is, if he can get his
hands on Léo's research papers.
This results in a maddening film of
three evocatively gory ritualistic-like cannibal murder scenes (the
trucker, two cat burglars on the prowl at the wrong country house, and the
curious hotel maid), as the urban landscape is strewn with bloody bodies
and those who are psychologically crippled from the aftereffects of a
world that no longer has any promising religious answers for what makes
the human brain tick. Science and not religion, as in the older horror
films, is now man's last hope. Denis's film seemed more rewarding
afterwards then at first viewing; that is, if one starts thinking about
its subliminal messages. Thereby, in its bareness, the viewer can fill in
their own responses to the missing blanks. Denis seems to be simply saying
man will have to learn to control his own instincts, as there's nothing in
the horizon that can save man from himself. Shane's threat to his innocent
bride plays as the film's metaphor.
"Trouble" can be viewed as
more of an oddity than a true genre horror film (which means this one is
fated for cult status and only for arthouse viewers). Its uniqueness and
the strange demands it makes on the viewer might baffle some, while others
will be thrilled at its denouement. Its major wrinkle in an otherwise
serious idea filled film, is that what the film ends up saying about sex
and violence seems hardly that important. But if you are like me--the film
will begin to grow on you the more you ponder it, as I enjoyed the film
much better my second time around. Vincent Gallo is right at home in this
French shocker playing his usual bad boy weirdo role. The film is half in
English and half in French (with English subtitles).
From www.sover.net/~ozus
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