A heavy metal fever dream of sex, violence and subversive queerpunk attitude, Titane already feels like a career-making cult classic. Written and directed by young Parisian provocateur Julia Ducournau, it chronicles the gender-twisting, body-morphing antics of a gleefully amoral female serial killer with a metal plate in her head and an exotic fetish for sex with motor vehicles. After scoring breakthrough success with her debut feature, the stylish cannibal coming-of-age thriller Raw (2016), Ducournau has amplified the eroticised carnage, body horror and political subtext here.
Titane is arguably designed for disruptive shock effect above all else, but it is also a highly original thrill ride full of strong performances, gorgeous visuals and bravura cinematic flourishes. Straddling the line between pulpy indulgence and art-house respectability, it is surely the most extreme film to date to score the prestigious double honour of winning the Cannes Palme d’Or and official French Oscar nomination. Shamefully, Ducournau is only the second ever female director awarded the Palme, 28 years after Jane Campion’s The Piano.
The plot of Titane was partly birthed from Ducournau’s nightmares, which helps explain why it stubbornly resists naturalistic interpretation or easy categorisation. In the punchy pre-credits sequence, bratty pre-teen Alexia (Adèle Guigue) is fitted with a titanium plate in her skull after almost dying in a car crash that she seemed diabolically keen to cause. Ominously, the doctors warn her parents to watch out for signs of neurological damage.
Angular androgyne beauty Agathe Rousselle makes her impressively fierce, committed feature debut as the adult Alexia. Jumping forward by a decade or so, the story finds her working as an erotic dancer at a custom-car show where testosterone-pumped male customers routinely grope the showgirls. When one fan crosses the line to pushy stalker, Alexia coolly stabs him to death with a giant hairpin in a mercilessly precise manner that suggests she has killed before. Afterwards, in a gloriously deranged sequence laced with sly humour, she celebrates the murder by having weapons-grade sex with a jacked-up, booty-bouncing, flame-covered Cadillac. Hey, no kink-shaming, we have all been there.
Unable or unwilling to stop killing, Alexia is drawn into a same-sex tryst with fellow dancer Justine (Raw veteran Garance Marillier) that escalates from nipple-biting awkwardness to full-blooded massacre, another detour into deliciously dark comedy which Ducournau sets to ironically cheery Europop music. But as the body count mounts, Alexia fears a police manhunt closing in and hits on an audaciously deranged escape plan. First she radically alters her appearance by shaving her hair, binding her breasts and breaking her own nose in a horrific scene that cleverly sets viewers on edge without actually showing the moment of impact. Then she passes herself off as Adrien, the long-lost son of fire station boss Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a cold-case abduction victim missing for a decade.
By choosing to remain mute, Alexia just about passes as Adrien, though most of Vincent’s fellow firefighters have their suspicions. This Boys Don’t Cry drag transformation looks absurdly implausible through a naturalistic lens, but works as a kind of stylised Freudian psychodrama. Crucially, Ducournau signals that Vincent himself is complicit in the delusion on some level, so desperately does he need his long-lost son to still be alive, even in fantasy changeling form. Gallic screen veteran Lindon does great work here, his soul-weary performance lending emotional authenticity to a surreal fairy-tale plot, his wounded hangdog expression suggesting a needy, festering paternal love with unsettling hints of incest.
Complicating matters further, Alexia appears to be pregnant from her auto-erotic sex session with the priapic Cadillac, her body leaking engine oil, her swollen belly bulging with shiny metallic scars. Raised by a gynecologist and a dermatologist, Ducournau has always highlighted the stinky, gunky, messy reality of human bodies in her films. But Titane takes this fleshy fixation to a new level with its relentless focus on bruises, cuts, sagging breasts, seeping wounds, steroid-pumped muscles, bodily fluids and broken bones. The main effect here is to highlight the sheer physical torture Alexia must endure to confirm to gender norms, both as biological female and fake male.
While Ducournau is not the first director to fuse body horror with art-house sensibilities, her most obvious cinematic ancestors are all men. David Cronenberg is a clear touchstone here, for the queasy carnal fixation and car-fetish sex. But there are also echoes of Gaspar Noe’s orgiastic nihilism, David Lynch’s hallucinatory noirscapes, Paul Verhoeven’s arch exploitation riffs, Lars Von Trier’s highbrow torture porn, the bloodthirsty delirium of Nicholas Winding Refn and the grotesque fabulism of Leos Carax. Crucially, Ducournau subverts the unifying “male gaze” of this cult pantheon and opens up a fruitful new battleground, blending fantastical nightmare imagery with the very real horror of patriarchal pressures on female bodies.
Inevitably, Titane has proved divisive with critics and audiences, following a familiar hype cycle from adulatory reception in Cannes to lukewarm backlash grumblings later. Some reviewers have dismissed the film as a shallow exercise in pure style snd cheap shock. For others, it contains fascinating political and intellectual depths, with a timely interest in gender as performance and transgressively queer sexuality. The fact that Ducournau uses the same character names across all her films to date, hinting at deeper meta-narrative intentions, only invites further academic analysis. There is certainly enough material here to fuel dozens of PhD dissertations, plus countless angry arguments on Twitter.
One key strength of Titane is that it works on both levels, as lurid gonzo joyride and as culturally rich text. Assessed as conventional cinematic drama, there are undoubtedly flaws to critique here, notably Ducournau’s incoherent plotting and oddly flat final pay-off. Her refusal to judge, punish or even explain Alexia’s psycho-killer rampage is both strength and weakness, depending on your need for neat karmic justice in fiction.
But as a button-pushing, taboo-prodding, revved-up sensory experience, Titane is a blast. Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens (another Raw veteran) serves up ravishing colours and high-calibre camerawork, whether weaving nimbly around Alexia’s auto-show dance routine or finding heavenly beauty in a hellish forest fire. Ducournau also fills the soundtrack with great needle-drop jukebox moments, from bookending Alexia’s journey with two versions of the antique folk classic The Wayfaring Stranger to using aggressively pummeling techno to highlight the hypermasculine, homoerotically charged milieu of Vincent’s fire station. Wherever its director goes from here, Titane is a fiercely original, arrestingly weird and frequently hilarious film. Long live the new flesh.
Director: Julia Ducournau
Screenwriters: Julia Ducournau, Jacques Akchoti, Simonetta Greggio, Jean-Christophe Bouzy
Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh, Bertrand Bonello, Dominique Frot
Producers: Jean-Christophe Reymond, Jean Yves Rubin, Cassandre Warnauts, Oliver Père, Philippe Logie, Anne-Laure Declerck, Christophe Hollebek
Cinematographer: Ruben Impens
Editor: Jean-Christophe Bouzy
Production designers: Laurie Colson, Lise Peault
Costume designer: Anne-Sophie Gledhill
Music: Jim Williams
Production companies: Kazak Productions (France), Arte France Cinema (France), Frakas Productions (Belgium), VOO (Belgium), BeTV (Belgium)
World sales: Wild Bunch International
In French
108 minutes
