TROUBLE EVERY DAY (Claire Denis, 2001)

Cannibalistic sex is contrasted with tenderness, which have broken down and become separate though never free from the threat of crossover, in Claire Denis’s vampire movie, Trouble Every Day, co-written by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Denis. Coré is kept locked up by her spouse, research scientist Léo Semeneau, who tries to come up with an antidote for her condition, but somehow she gets out at night from their suburban Parisian home for some lethal roadside bloodsucking/sex. Poor Léo can’t risk having sex with his own wife, as a result of which all his love is expressed as tenderness. Crosscutting and overlapping sound and image from one shot to the next link Coré’s condition to Shane Brown’s odd behavior.
     Shane and June, newlyweds, are in Paris on their honeymoon; but Shane can’t seem to consummate their marriage. When sex seems imminent, Shane tears himself away from June—otherwise, he is poignantly tender toward her—and retreats to the bathroom, where he (literally!) whacks himself off. No matter which gender is the vampire, it appears, the guy is the protective spouse. However, a woman cabbie takes the couple to the hotel, and a room maid is the twenty-first century “bellboy” lugging their luggage to their room.
     Denis’s exquisite, erotic horror film notes things that are amiss in the everyday world: a family estrangement; on-the-job theft; insatiable appetites. A Mona Lisa-lampshade hints the commercial degeneracy of a culture. Throughout, there’s a confusion of motive and outcome. Did Shane “steal” Léo’s research for the antidote to his own condition, or is his condition the punitive result of the professional theft?
     ”I want to go home,” Shane finally tells June, whose red gloves—the film is alternately tinged and saturated with red—are a displacement upwards of you-know-whose ruby slippers.

STOLEN LIFE (Li Shaohong, 2005)

A crossing of symbiotic pathologies; from China, Sheng si jie details the relationship between a college student and a truck driver. The fact-based digital video won as best narrative feature at Tribeca.
     It is a stunning social melodrama. Working from a script by Yimei Liao, Li Shaohong presents something of a character puzzle. At film’s opening, the start of a complex portrait, we glimpse Yan’ni in childhood. The six-year old is withdrawn and repressed, abandoned by her single mother and bullied by unsympathetic female relations, who overcompensate at Yan’ni’s expense for the paltry choices available to Chinese women. Yan’ni is passive, withdrawn, vulnerable. We gain perspective from her voiceover—a voice of experience. Muyu, the driver whom she meets by accident at college, draws Yan’ni (Zhou Xun, excellent) into an intimate relationship that is in fact part of a scheme to make money off of her by exploiting to the limit her accepting, passive nature. Muyu, whose personal history is similar to Yan’ni’s, is a misogynist—a peasant boy making money at the expense of the girls he cons. His scheme requires also a manipulation of state practices for its execution.
     Yan’ni’s voiceover at turns admits the former Yan’ni’s foolishness, her near willingness to be deceived and manipulated, but the film’s long flashback presents images that press toward her self-exoneration and perpetual irresponsibility and victimization. Ultimately, the fractured soul that these parallel tracks imply come together in a way that underscores Yan’ni’s inconsolable grief, her ongoing situation of being lost to herself. She addresses us directly, as though we can help her. We feel implicated in the tragedy of Yan’ni’s lack of self-determination, which she projects upon us as guilt for her predicament.
     Almost surreptitiously, Li is taking accurate aim at gender and class biases.