Trouble Every Day (2002)

As if to thumb her nose at the ecstatic critical reception she received for her athletically beautiful 2000 film, ''Beau Travail,'' and the expectations raised by such success, French filmmaker Claire Denis has set out to frighten her fans, or at least smear us with goo. Trouble Every Day -- a bomb at Cannes last year and a hysterical yet humorless disquisition on the thin line between sucking face and literally sucking face -- is a demented, orgiastically gory vampire/sex parable in which Coré (Béatrice Dalle) literally eats her lovers. She can't help herself. She's hungrrrrry. This disappoints her doctor husband, Léo (Alex Descas), who wishes she'd develop better table manners. But it thrills Shane (Vincent Gallo), an American scientist with a barely controlled carnivorous lust all his own, who flies with his unsuspecting new wife (Tricia Vessey) to Paris to consult with Léo.

The director and her fearless cinematographer, Agnès Godard, throw themselves into their thick muck of sex and bloody violence; there's nothing they won't and don't show and nothing Dalle won't wrap her huge slash of a mouth around. As for Gallo, that pasty self-styled provocateur, it's clear the filmmaker used him for his natural ability to repel -- all that ratty American indie posturing loose in Paris, dirtying the hotel linens. It's also clear that he's trouble in every movie, leeching nutrients even from Denis' cinematic night soil.

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