NYFF 2021 Film Review: Titane
There are layers upon layers within Julia Ducournau’s twisted, tender Titane
The New York Film Festival lineup is full of winners this year, but even in a field of remarkable cinema, Julia Ducournau’s Titane stands out. A film that contains multitudes, Ducournau’s followup to 2016’s Raw navigates the horrorscapes of the New Flesh, exploring gender, sex, violence, and the enveloping desire for human connection. Titane is shocking, sweet, and shockingly sweet - one of the year’s best films. Minor spoilers ahead…
Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) is a dancer. In a hypnotic, neon-drenched tracking shot, she makes her way through a sweaty auto trade show before stopping at a decked-out hot rod. Clad in atomic yellow fishnets and a choppy undercut revealing a sinister, coiled scar on her head, she gyrates and grinds up against the glistening metal of the car. The men in the room - as if they’re unable to fetishize the cold hard steel without also ogling the female form - hoot and holler, snap photos, and get handsy. Titane’s moments past its cold open are rife with the male gaze, but it’s a perspective that director Julia Ducournau quickly - and brutally - dispatches: A superfan crosses the line, and Alexia responds to his unwanted advances with swift and terminal violence. This subversion is only the tip of the iceberg for Titane’s cauldron of tones and themes, mixed together to form a potent elixir of the unusual, profane, and heartfelt.
You see, Alexia is a dancer, but she’s also a killer. A thirty-something still living with her callous parents, it’s implied that she’s behind a rash of recent disappearances and murders. But Julia Ducournau, ever the deft absurdist, has even more to add to Alexia’s psychological template. Titane opens with a gruesome flashback, detailing our antiheroine as a young motorhead whose skull is patched with the titular metal when her father’s car crashes. Through bloody surgical fusion of flesh and steel, Ducournau sets the foundation for the rest of her wild narrative, invoking the likes of Shinya Tsukamoto and David Cronenberg. Alexia has a fondness for automobiles - a predilection for machines - that predates even her accident, but is perhaps spurred by her kills as an adult: After murdering her overzealous admirer, she fucks her car. In perhaps the wildest scene of “auto” eroticism since Cronenberg’s Crash or Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, Alexia climbs into the back of her flame-painted Caddy, grabs a pair of velvet handles, and goes to town as the hydraulics rhythmically launch the vehicle up and down. The anatomical compatibility and logistics are left to our imaginations, but it’s a surreal kind of oddity that results in the impossible: Alexia is now pregnant by way of the machine.
“Ducournau’s followup to 2016’s Raw navigates the horrorscapes of the New Flesh, exploring gender, sex, violence, and the enveloping desire for human connection.”
Alexia’s phantasmagorical pregnancy is body horror to a tee, a commentary on the futility and fragility of flesh told through searing, uncanny imagery. The fruit of her mechanical lust quickly starts transforming Alexia’s body in terrifying ways: her blood and breast milk are replaced by black, viscous motor oil, and her womb begins to harden into impenetrable steel. It’s harrowing stuff that had some of the audience peering through their fingers, but just when you think Titane is about to go full-tilt into its transmogrifying nightmare, Ducournau switches gears in a reversal so astonishing, it would give you whiplash if it weren’t so elegantly executed. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to double-bill Titane with Michael Sarnoski’s Pig from earlier this year. Both utilize genre convention to telegraph the common expectation, only for it to never materialize; perhaps more so with Pig - because let’s face it, you’ve never seen anything like Titane before - but they’re both films that are deceptive with their devastating sweetness.
After another murder turns into a gory comedy of errors, Alexia finds herself on the lam. It’s here where her story intersects with Vincent (a phenomenal Vincent Lindon), a lonely firefighter whose son vanished without a trace a decade earlier. An ultra-masculine sad sack with a penchant for pumping iron, sticking himself with steroids, and flying into fits of grief, he quickly becomes a patriarchal figure to our fugitive killer. To say any more would spoil the best parts of Titane, but the film quickly weaves a powerful thread of heart underneath its horrors. Here, Ducournau touches upon the fluidity of gender, dysmorphia, and the ever blurring lines between femininity and masculinity, flesh and technology. Much like 2016’s Raw, Titane presses upon the hot-button issues in today’s society, but to call it “timely” or “teachable” would be an incredible misnomer: Ducournau has no interest in parable; instead, she aims to provoke complex thought and visceral reactions through an unsettling lens and envelope-pushing discomfort.
“…switches gears in a reversal so astonishing, it would give you whiplash if it weren’t so elegantly executed.”
Titane is very much a hefty two-hander. Agathe Rousselle, in her acting debut, is a remarkable find: Searing, scowling, and physical, her performance is singular in its ability to spark empathy despite her vicious crimes. And paired with Vincent Lindon’s inextricable papa bear turn, the two form the basis of a powerful catharsis belied by gruesome circumstance. Alexia and Vincent are two lost, damaged souls seeking connection, and Titane strikes straight at the heart of the human need for nurture, and the need to nurture.
Stomach-churning violence, wince-inducing body horror, and a surprising dose of tenderness wrapped up in a discomfiting package filled with grease and motor oil, Titane is a unique cinematic vision. Its transgressive style is sure to ignite hyperbole on just how wild the film is, but there’s a soft, beating heart underneath its hood that interrogates the societal lenses we place upon gender, sexuality, and human connection. Titane won’t be for everyone, but those willing to take a seat on its flame-painted grill will find a maelstrom of a good time: Horrifying, confounding, and moving, Julia Ducournau finds herself at the forefront of genre filmmaking once again.
