Titane

MOVIE #1,090 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 08.01.23 Part of My (impromptu) JULIA DUCOURNAU Director Focus This is the reason we are here. I decided to watch all of Julia Ducournau’s movies to date because of the “girl fucks a car” Palme d'Or winner, Titane (2021). What can I say? I’m a sucker for “girl fucks a car” Palme d'Or winners, I guess. That’s what I could say. Write it on my tombstone. This is clearly the best of the batch even though it’s still flawed in many of the same ways Raw is. Like the insane vet school hazing rituals in that film, we find Ducournau’s unique ability to construct scenes and scenarios that seem wholly implausible given the context. And I’m not even talking about the whole objectophilia/car-fucking thing or even any of the body horror!

The insanely homoerotic fireman dance party/mosh pit comes to mind, for instance. It’s not strange that a bunch of young firemen would get wild partying down with their brethren, but not that wild and not in that way. In a vacuum, this creates an uncanny valley effect that’s good. But this is a movie that clearly doesn’t want to exist in a vacuum. This is a movie which, painfully (in more ways than one!), wants you to distill its bonkers visual trappings into bigger, more universal ideas. And that’s where the movie, again, fails. In part (again) because of a lack of character development with its protagonist, Alexia. It isn’t that she’s literally a serial killer. It’s that she’s a serial killer because her dad yelled at her one time to put her seatbelt on? And the ensuing accident after said event made her want to fuck cars and hate the human race in equal measures? OK. We both can’t relate to and don’t want to relate to her, and furthermore: each point is moot because we’re not given enough to begin with.

Thankfully, Vincent London as a depressed dad mourning the disappearance of his son offers a counterpoint and some empathy which completely salvage things on a structural level. The basis for his connecting with Alexia is hilariously far-fetched but that also feels intentional. Finally, there’s a person in this world just as weird and screwed up as she is. This element was wholly missing from Raw and Titane is infinitely better for it.

And look, visually it’s a ton of fun and completely demented. Who doesn’t want to see a lady literally burst apart after the hyper-in utero transformation of being impregnated with a car baby? 10/10 no notes on that front.

In the end, truly trying to parse what this is actually about is a futile slog though. Color me daft, but every angle (it’s a trans story! it’s about motherhood! it’s about stifling non-traditional sexualities!) left me rolling my eyes. Still, I’m happy a film as strange as this got the huge praise that it did (let alone got made in the first place) and I definitely want to see where Ducournau goes next.

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Titane (French: [titan], lit. 'Titanium') is a 2021 body horror psychological drama film written and directed by Julia Ducournau. The French-Belgian co-production stars Agathe Rousselle in her feature film debut as Alexia, a woman who, after being injured in a car crash as a child, has a titanium plate fitted into her head. Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier and Laïs Salameh also star. It was released on July 13, 2021.