Trouble Every Day

Claire Denis takes the New French Extremity's founding bet, that the art house and the abattoir can share a bed, and commits harder than anyone who came after. Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle play two people whose sexual appetite has curdled into a literal hunger for flesh, and Denis withholds plot, explanation and mercy in roughly equal measure. Agnès Godard shoots it in that hazy, tactile style where a curtain gets the same loving attention as a killing, and Tindersticks score it like a lullaby. It was booed at Cannes and remains the title people reach for to prove the wave began in the art house. Slow, ravishing, and flatly upsetting the two times it decides to move.