Review - TITANE
By Interlocutor Magazine
The experience of watching French film director Julia Ducournau’s TITANE is akin to a direct visceral immersion into the titular material itself, which is “a metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys, often used in medical prostheses due to its pronounced biocompatibility.”
The queasy mixing of flesh and metal isn’t quite a new sight in cinema, with raw depictions of human/metal melding seen in 1989’s cyberpunk body horror cult film Tetsuo: The Iron Man by Shinya Tsukamoto, and in the body horror master David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash (based on the JG Ballard novel), which focuses on a group of people sexually aroused by auto crashes and the orifices of their resultant bodily injuries.
But TITANE takes this theme into unexpectedly layered dimensions. It’s an exploration of identity, gender, and even a near spiritually redemptive tenderness, all in the midst of a contemporary southern French setting that seems to exist simultaneously within both this world and in some strange or hidden parallel reality. Absolute extremes are everywhere here: violence, sex, delusion, desire. But embedded within those extremes there is also a nuanced look at the outsiders and the lost and damned souls of the world, and what they must do not just to survive but also to find something like a sense of belonging and purpose.
TITANE won the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, the festival’s top prize. Ducournau made a significant international impression with her first feature film, 2016’s Raw, in which a young veterinarian student and lifelong vegetarian (Garance Marillier, who also plays a role in TITANE) suddenly discovers her taste for raw flesh, and especially flesh of the human variety. But unlike in Raw, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), the young woman at the center of TITANE, doesn’t even start off for the viewer as someone sympathetic or easily identifiable – she seems petulant and detached as the film opens and we see her as a little girl (played by Adèle Guigue) menacing her harried father as she rides with him in a car, kicking the back of his driver’s seat while making incessant race car noises, to the point where she distracts him enough to cause the car to crash. The disaster results in a titanium plate inserted into her head, and as soon as she is released from the hospital, she embraces the car and kisses its windows, as if the accident was the essential catalyst she needed to molt into the next phase of her existence, a creature meant to meld with metal in the most biblical of ways.
Agathe Rousselle in TITANE - photos by Carole Bethuel - NEON
Cut to a couple of decades later, and Alexia is now an erotic dancer whose specialties are writhing suggestively against super modified cars at auto shows, to the gapes and leers of male automobile aficionados. She’s cold and distant to her fellow dancers, and quickly murderous towards an overeager fan who follows her out to her own car later that night. Considering the ease by which she dispatches him with her long and sharp hairpin, it’s apparent that this is likely not the first time she has killed. And later that night, she is paid a visit by the very same tricked-out Cadillac she danced atop earlier. This car was not satisfied with a mere lap dance, and what follows must be one of the most audacious and bizarre sex scenes ever filmed.
But a dangerous liaison with a vehicle is only just a little stranger than the rest of Alexia’s life. Early in the film it becomes clear that she is a serial killer who has left a trail of victims so abundant that she becomes aware of how close the authorities are closing in on her, especially after she leaves a witness at a party house murder spree that is depicted both with intense gore and sly, dry humor. And once Alexia goes on the run, the film takes a turn towards a direction so unexpected and transcendent that it defies any pat categorization.
Seeing a computer simulation of a missing boy named Adrien as he would appear now as a young man, Alexia decides to embody his identity and return to the boy’s father in the guise of his lost son. The father, a man named Vincent (played by Vincent London, a major French movie star who remains virtually unknown in the US), just happens to be an aging macho firehouse captain with an out-of-control steroid injection addiction along with an inner existential void carved out by both the loss of his son and his deep estrangement from the boy’s mother. After Alexia makes certain modifications to her appearance (binding her breasts, breaking her own nose, and also taping down her suddenly swelling belly, now pregnant with an auto/human fetus), she shows up at a police station claiming to be the long-lost boy, and Vincent welcomes his lost child back with tearful and seemingly unquestioning eyes.
Vincent London in TITANE - photo by Carole Bethuel - NEON
TITANE director Julia Ducournau - photo by Philippe Quaisse - NEON
It is in this second half of the film that the subversiveness of Ducournau’s intentions comes truly to light. Previously, anything presented for stereotypically male-gazing enjoyment is shattered by the sheer brutality that accompanies each image that might otherwise be titillating, but in the film’s second act, all gender coding is flipped in subtler ways.
Vincent’s firehouse is a hyper machismo environment so over-the-top that it steers directly into homoeroticism, while the sweaty virile male bodies are often bathed in soft pink light. Despite her physical alterations, Alexia looks nothing like a young man, but most of the firefighters quietly accept her presence at the domineering militaristic insistence of their chief. But when Adrien’s mother (Myriem Akheddiou) arrives and clearly recognizes that Alexia is not her son, she asks her to grant Vincent the illusion, and indeed, what ultimately seems to matter in the film’s world are not simple appearances, but the fulfillment of deeper instincts for care, shelter, and actualization. This ultimately leads to an uncompromising denouement that fits perfectly into the film’s own peculiar take on classic archetypes. It’s a roller coaster of brutality and sentiment unmatched by any recent cinema, but it’s a ride well worth taking if you’ve got the guts for it.
TITANE is currently in limited theatrical release and it is also now available on various streaming platforms.
Read our other film and TV-related coverage:
We interview director Beth B for her new feature-length documentary about punk legend Lydia Lunch
Art Director Liz Kloczkowsi talks about her work on the Oscar-winning film Promising Young Woman
