TROUBLE EVERY DAY (1966)

Claire Denis named her film TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001) after a 1966 Frank Zappa song of the same name. Released on the debut album FREAK OUT! by Zappa's band The Mothers of Invention, was written in 1965 as Zappa watched the Watts Riots. The riot lasted 6 days in Los Angeles, which killed 34 and injured over a thousand.  It ranked as the largest riot in Los Angeles until 1992.  The themes of racial and social injustice as well as violence pertain to Denis' body of work as a director and her experiences in colonial Africa.

TROUBLE EVERY DAY SCREENING

"... a film that is profoundly disturbing, yet hauntingly unforgettable."

-John Anderson, NEWSDAY

"Nothing Denis has made before ... could prepare us for this gory, perverted, sex-soaked riff on the cannibal genre."
-V.A. Musetto, NEW YORK POST

"Purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons."
-J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

"A hysterical yet humorless disquisition on the thin line between sucking face and literally sucking face."
-Lisa Schwarzbaum, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Emphasizing mood over narrative TROUBLE EVERY DAY is an erotic modern-day horror story about a man and woman separated by thousands of miles, yet united by an insatiable taste for human flesh.  An American couple honeymooning in Paris shifts to a horror story when the groom is unable to control his libido for sex and violence.  He has come to Paris in search of an elusive doctor studying his particular ailment, which coincidentally afflicts the doctor's own wife.  Divided between his pure bride and the doctor's carnivorous wife, the man's impulses turn to a disturbing sexual violence.  An abstract horror film with a mysterious illness, a mad scientist, and cannibals, TROUBLE EVERY DAY eschews traditional narrative and either reinvents or destroys the horror genre in the process. 

Suggested Supplemental Screenings:  WHITE MATERIAL (Denis, 2009), BETTY BLUE (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986), NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (George Romero, 1968)