No real bite

It's "trouble" all right; but French director Claire Denis is the one who's in it. Picking a Hannibal Lecter-like horror subject as her change-of-pace, change-of language - much of it is in English - isn't at all her diet.

Vincent Gallo, most idiosyncratic of actors, doesn't help, either, as a shaggy American scientist with cannibalistic longings who arrives in Paris on honeymoon.

He soon finds a flesh-mate in Beatrice Dalle as a random cannibal who's been released by a couple of punks who unwisely break into the suburban house where a mysterious-black doc is wisely keeping her behind bars. Sex is what starts these two off nuzzling into their respective pick-ups.

It's gory, visceral and vacuous. Denis, who made the film two years ago, gets nothing like the erotic charge she obtained from photographing the near-nude young French Foreign Legionnaires in her previous film, Beau Travail.

Trouble Every Day is false to her style, taste and cerebral approach to sexual repression, and feels it every minute. Shock values may tempt an art-house talent into producing what she hopes will be box-office. What comes out, though, is simply badly handled pretentiousness. Released 26 December.