Trouble Every Day, The Platform

Zombie fu interior design in Trouble Every Day

Leslie Fiedler, in his introduction to Jonathan Cott's wonderful collection of Victorian fairy tales, Beyond the Looking Glass, posits two possible conclusions to all such fables. One, the happy one, is living en famille ever after. Unhappy endings usually involve the protagonists being eaten. The good conclusion intimates immortality through offspring. The bad is bestial in its consumption of the young. America's insatiable desire for zombie carnage dates back to the trauma of the 60s. George Romero kickstarted things with Night of the Living Dead, but such pointed works as Funkadelic's America Eats its Young also tumbled out of that tumultuous era. Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day is a Euro variant from 2001 that takes this idea literally: cannibalistic mutants feast on the bodies of their victims in a postmodern critique of consumerism. The body is Denis' canvas here, as in Beau Travail. The eros of the flesh soon leads to Thanatos as sex here leads to blood feasts.

Trouble Every Day does have a semblance of a plot, but that is its weakest point. Newlyweds Vincent Gallo and Tricia Vessey travel to Paris for their honeymoon. Unfortunately, zombie flashbacks point towards PTSD for Mr. Gallo's character. We learn, again through flashbacks, that he is a research physician who was working on some kind of mysterioso project that obviously went awry. In Paris, he tries to look up a former colleague. The doctor, played by the dependable Alex Descas, has a wife, Beatrice Dalle in fine form, who also desires feeding on flesh. Her husband tries to keep her locked up in their house, but apparently they don't have Home Depot in France and he ends up burying her prey. In the film's most memorable scene, two young vagrants break into the house with predictably gory results.

Cinematography, editing and costumes are all first class, Ms. Denis coaxes uniformly fine performances. Even Mr. Gallo, at the height of his rock goddess boffing fame, shows restraint. Yet the picture does not amount to much and my mind was left hungry. Denis is a passionate director and lacks the mordant satiric touch of a Cronenberg needed for the attack on Big Pharma (or whatever was intended) in the lab sequences. Not coincidentally, Cronenberg's last project was a, bloodless I'm afraid, novel entitled Consumed and it is also a consumerist critique. Trouble Every Day lacks bite. Denis would go onto investigate similar corporeal themes more fruitfully in the recent High Life.

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's The Platform is a Spanish (and Basque) horror film with a bit more bite than Trouble Every Day. The Platform's premise is intriguing. Inmates are incarcerated in vertically stacked cells. There is an aligned hole in the cells into which a platform descends containing food for the day. Meal time is only a few minutes until the platform drops down into the next cell. What is a magnificent feast at the top of the prison turns into smashed crockery and maggots when it reaches the bottom. Survival only seems possible at the top of the food chain.

Gaztelu-Eguiler deftly brings out echoes of Beckett and Poe in the two handed first act. The protagonist is played competently, but dully by Ivan Massague. Zorion Eguileor gets to gnaw on a hambone as his cellmate and nemesis, Trimagasi. Trimagasi believes in the transactional bartering of information, so scenes between the two gradually assume the dynamics of torture. Once the torture becomes literal, all hell breaks loose. Levels are explored and the resultant cannibalism seems inevitable.

The third act is a letdown. Too many scenarists hope violence will provide the catharsis, but here it occasionally looks silly. The director does seize on the visual possibilities of the platform as a still life. The goodies are devoured quickly in a simulation of real time before our eyes. The transience of our life, desires and appetites lie before us and tell us all is vanity. Flames flicker and fade. The fruit and flesh rot, all will decay: the moral of the Vanitas and Horror genres.

Our current mass incarceration dilemma gives The Platform more resonance, but it is the social stratification of this film that aligns it with Parasite, Roma and many others of recent ilk. The parallels with Bong's Snowpiercer, which had stratification on a different plane (horizontal rather than vertical), has already been noted. The Platform ends with a communitarian ethos enforcing self sacrifice upon the prisoners in order that the next generation may prosper. Ever after trumps once again over the consumption of human flesh.

Vanitas in The Platform