On Rewatching

and an unintentional Trouble Every Day and Exotica double billing

When I first watched Trouble Every Day I was not on its wavelength and in fact, had it misrepresented to me as a text more on par with Raw. I remember being deeply alienated by it and trying to grasp for something within it legible to me, but coming up wanting. Over time thinking about and through it, it began to settle into my bones in a new way and I felt deeply connected to it. That’s why I don’t mind not remembering the details of movies I watch, I trust that they lodge in me in the ways I need.

I rewatched it theatrically with Kelley and their friend and thought about where it may have first met all of us, and where it was meeting us now. I found the violence incredibly reifying and saw everything in the film’s world with stunning clarity. I was rapt at attention and leaned in when I knew there was going to be a particular burst of ferocity. But this came not by way of the social media primed qualifiers of identification that hindered my first viewing but because, albeit deeply abstracted, it was representing a truth I’ve found myself come up against again and again in my life. And to see with such precision, an unvarnished display of the hierarchy of quotidian cruelties made me deeply happy - someone was saying it - my reality was affirmed and I, was granted catharsis.

In the film Béatrice Dalle and Alex Descas are a couple pushed to the extremes of uncertainty, but clinging to one another in spite of it. No matter the severity of the choices Alex Descas’ Léo makes in trying to adapt to their present circumstances, all I could see was a deep love and refusal to cede to its uncompromising terms. I felt newly struck by the vulnerability of Béatrice Dalle’s performance as Coré - she so wholly succumbs to the violence she’s enacting, with startling physical gestures which bring to mind a pre-pubescent lack of impulse control. What really solidifies the impact, is the presence of a deep sense of despair in the face of what she’s becoming.

The stalwart commitment to one another which is the foundation of Dalle and Descas’ dynamic’s inverse is represented in Tricia Vessey and Vincent Gallo’s Mr. and Mrs. Brown. They’re newlyweds but the relationship already feels hollowed out - as if they’re merely going through the gestures of marriage as a necessary bourgeois signifier. Whereas Léo and Coré are fighting to bring their worlds together as Shane, Gallo is already keeping his wife at arms length, a fact which seems like it would remain the case irrespective of his immediate crisis. The dialogue in Trouble Every Day rarely strays far from questions of where are you where are you going what are you doing - which feels in step with the ways that archetype of couple’s relationships are characterized by a lack of security and taking account of one or the other’s presences and absences.

This spectrum of intensity and sparsity is what I was drawn in by. The choreography of violence remains provocative because of the film’s attudenesness to the reality brutality is always possible, even and especially in moments of intimacy. That uncompromising quality and how it permeates the character’s interactions was deeply comforting to me. Trouble Every Day has very few active narrative threads - but two of its central ones are simply the desires of characters being followed to their natural point of conclusion, however bruising and unseemly. Everyone looks at each other with such bald wanting, or open disgust - desire overtakes people like a pathological fixation - I cede that it is opaque but its emotions are plain as day. The film hinges on a moment of recognition; even as it falls in the wake of extreme carnage, it feels pulsating, raw and vulnerable. A character is forced to show themselves and the unwilling witness, acting out of self-preservation, or overwhelmed by being confronted with a baseness which also lies within them, violently lashes out - and that moment of repulsion feels like one of the most true things I’ve seen on screen in recent memory.

I went to see Exotica by myself. Sometimes I watch Mia Kirshner’s club performance on YouTube or listen to its backing song to transport myself somewhere different, deriving pleasure from its uncanny fantasy. My last encounter with the film was by way of Julia Hendrickson and Kate Whiteway’s Interior. Exotica. Night. at Conditions. The installation’s attempt to recreate the film’s central performance reminded me of trying to find out whether Exotica was a place that had actually existed after watching the film for the first time. The restaging of the performance is overlaid with the film’s scene creating a spectral quality which conjures the sources text’s hauntology but also Interior. Exotica. Night’s own exploration of the futility of reenactment, the emotional stunting which is borne from loss and the processes of grieving. This felt in step with something I initially gravitated towards in Exotica, how gestures feel loaded with meaning we can’t name and beyond our comprehension, no matter how ritualized they become.

One of the only things which I remembered about Exotica was its key and final reveal. I assimilated that knowledge into my understanding of the film’s events and upon realizing, that this was in fact the detail which simultaneously renders its events both more and less clearly - I felt struck by having accepted it as a stabilized truth. Even as a fact of the film’s plot - the notion of taking the most barbed aspect of a situation and refuting the possibility that there was another way, felt like a mirror of the characters in the film.

Like the first time I watched it I ribbed against Exotica’s immediate appearance as tepid middle brow provocation and what I perceived as the heavy handedness of its themes. But in both instances, its upending of viewer knowledge and insistence the only constant is the cycles of grief and the unrelenting attempts to exist within them disarmed me and had me recanting my words. At its end, everything feels fated. The patterns of living the characters have settled into feel like the only real possible way for them to live their lives. The bulky fashion in which some of the reveals sit feels true to the discomfort of certain revelations - some truths can’t be looked at head on, but have to be approached from a canted angle.

Both Trouble Every Day and Exotica understand that fact and are unsparingly honest about how looking functions, the distinction between that and truly seeing and their belief as to whether that is even really possible. Exotica has the mediated ecosystem of the strip club and Trouble Every Day’s expanse is wider but echoes of the former’s routines of looking exist in the settings of the home and hotel.

I’m not in the regular habit of rewatching, and realized I’d unknowingly associated doing so with seeking comfort. I never consciously considered the spectrum of emotion they can invite beyond that. In these rewatches, I noticed how I had become closer to and more distant from respective qualities in the films, as a result of how life’s experiences had situated me differently in relation to them. Time will impress upon you how often you will be called to reconstitute your worldview. In knowing that you are its primary arbiter, you have to decide how and if you’re going to try to enact the changes that will ensure you’re moving in alignment with the new realities of that viewpoint. What these films offered, was the permission to step into a vision of a world that aligns with the reality of how I feel, but try to remain at a distance from, in an attempt to uphold a principled stance against certain ways of seeing, but that too, takes discipline. And so ultimately, I was glad, to have those viewpoints refracted to me through the act of art making, and to be able to have another conduit for imagining —living in time requires an adaptive imagination, which sometimes calls for stillness but more often requires a hyper presence. That’s what movies offer, and that unchanging temporality is one thing I can count on to remain the same. I’ll change but the movies won’t.