Claire Denis - Trouble Every Day (2001)

Shane Brown is a young American scientist, tormented with violent sexual nightmares and a ravenous bloodlust. He arrives in Paris on his honeymoon and tries to get in touch with a former colleague, Dr. Léo Sémeneau, an experimental brain scientist, but the doctor has disappeared. The doctor’s wife, Coré, meanwhile, seems to be victim to the same condition and is on the loose on an unstoppable orgy of sex and murder.

If we're seeing an unexpected renaissance of art movies from all over the world – and I think we are – then surely French filmmaker Claire Denis is one of this minimovement's patron saints. Her films offer elliptical narratives with little notion of closure, a languorous, often dangerous eroticism and a desire to inhabit and subvert the conventions of genre movies: mysteries, thrillers, romances. For the most part, "Trouble Every Day" is a moody, troubling work, masterfully photographed, that drifts from one gray Parisian incident to another in the rootless spirit of Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, Denis' acknowledged mentors.

But be forewarned: "Trouble Every Day" has more in store than 1970s-style urban angst, its paranoid '70s-style plot about a dark scientific secret or, for that matter, star Vincent Gallo's '70s-style "Serpico" 'do. This is a sexual knife-twister, somewhat in the tradition of David Cronenberg's "Crash" (and, even more so, "The Brood") or Nagisa Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses." Like those films, it's being released unrated by the MPAA, so most Americans outside big cities and college towns won't be able to see it at all, and when it appears on video Blockbuster won't carry it.