The Transporter
dir. Corey Yuen
20th Century Fox

You need to be patient to watch Claire Denis at work. Not because she directs dull movies — Trouble Every Day offers explicit scenes of rape, murder and cannibalism. But as with her previous films (I Can't Sleep, Beau Travail), she demands a good deal from her viewers. If you sit down expecting a fast-paced psychological thriller, you may end up disappointed.

If anything, though, it's the relatively conventional style of Denis' latest film that makes it seem weaker than her early work. Unlike the nearly dialogue-free Beau Travail, whose mesmerizing visuals more than compensated for the lack of any recognizable dramatic structure, Trouble Every Day has an outlandishly lurid storyline and enough dialogue to expose the shaky acting skills of a few cast members.

Denis' strengths lie elsewhere, but they shimmer through even in this poorly chosen project. She directs for the eye above all, and in a few memorable shots, it shows — the bleak anomie of a freeway running through the industrial outskirts of Paris, a hint of foreboding as a hotel maid trundles a cart down an endless corridor, a stand of gently bobbing weeds on a patch of wasteland drenched in human blood.

This is a film about madness and sexual murder. The plot comes together at Denis' characteristic ambling pace — biochemist Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) has come to Paris for his honeymoon, and we soon discover he's keeping more than one secret from his bride. He suffers from a strange illness that requires him to take a handful of pills every day — an odd and surely deliberate echo of the drug cocktails prescribed to AIDS patients — and he's searching desperately for a former colleague, Léo Semeneau (Alex Descas), who has quit a prestigious research post to care for his sick wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle). As for Coré's illness … well, suffice it to say that she doesn't always take her pills. Her husband leaves her carefully locked up each morning before he steps out of the house, and not for her own safety.

Denis' predilection toward minimal dialogue may make her Gallo's ideal director. With his haggard eyes and tense, lanky physicality, he manages to convey Brown's urgency from his first appearance on screen, although the creepy handlebar moustache almost tips his character into self-parody. But like some much better-looking actors (Keanu Reeves comes to mind), he's at his brooding best when not called on to open his mouth. And Tricia Vessey is even harder to endure as his naïve and gratingly sweet-voiced wife.

The French actors are better cast. Descas, familiar to Denis fans for his role in her I Can't Sleep, brings an appropriately dark flair to the character of Semeneau — a role that recalls Descas' equally silent, deadly turn as Joseph Mobutu in Lumumba. The real tour de force, though, comes from Dalle, who manages to convey Coré's blend of vulnerability and demented bloodlust without speaking more than a dozen words.

In linking sexual hunger to the real thing, Trouble Every Day treads some well-worn cinematic ground. The parallel has been grist for horror movies ever since Nosferatu, and the script's pseudo-scientific framework may add too much baggage to what's essentially one more retelling of the Dracula myth. But apart from being a gifted director in her own right, Denis also knows how to steal effectively from her predecessors; the neat Hitchcockian allusion of the final scene is worth the ticket price in itself. Though not without its flaws, the film is a powerful and stomach-churning treat.

— Jeff Rigsby (jeff_rigsby at hotmail dot com)