I mean, how can you make a movie about vampires, sex and marital problems sooo boring? How is that even humanly possible? If a filmmaker were to come to me and tried to pitch me an idea for a flick about blood-sucking vampire rapists (yes, rapists); I’d think about an exploitation flick from the 70’s or about a serious horror film with social commentary.
Claire Denis (the director of TrEvDa) does none of it. Instead she injects as much silence and “contemplation” into every single frame of this movie. The dialogues feel often very artificial as the characters remain quiet almost 90% of the time. I’m not kidding. Imagine going to a convenience store and instead of asking for cigarettes you were to look into the clerk’s eyes for like an entire minute, until he came to the idea of giving you your desired cancer inducing batons. Like, what the fuck? Why didn’t you just say: “I want some cigarettes”? Why? Why wasting your time, the clerk’s time and the audience’s time if your life was a movie?
This may sound exaggerated, but I’ve noticed that along with Trouble Every Day, there is this artsy I’m-better-than-you stupid trend of over-using silence in a bluntly forced way. Take Michael Kohlhaas (2016 Dir. Arnaud de Pallières) as an example. The main antagonist doesn’t say a word, even though he is not a mute. Why? Because fuck you that’s why!
Trouble Every Day by Claire Denis makes exactly the same mistake. They (the creators of the movie) desperately try to force silence into situations, where it doesn’t fit. I don’t even have to say this, but the entire film is so dull as a consequence. During the last minutes I was begging for it to end. Did I forget to mention that there is a rape scene? Yes, there is one, and I gotta say, the woman being attacked didn’t scream or ask for help. Why? Not because she was frozen by fear as any other person would be, but because there needs to be silence in every scene and because it’s the style of the movie.
A friend of mine even thought that I was misogynistic for criticizing that girl’s response. I said ‘fair enough, then why didn’t the male victim earlier in the film didn’t scream louder, when he was being cannibalized by the female vampire, while his best friend was just a few meters away?’
I mean, yeah, of course in moments of danger, like when you are in front of a lion, some people may freeze out of angst. I get it. That’s understandable. But when you have an entire film were everything is made out of annoying and irritating long pauses, the rape scene seems as a consequence also irrealistic.
Two out of five stars. Not recommended.
Radwulf
27.02.2022
