Titane

Julia Ducournau follows up her stomach-testing début feature Raw (2016) with an even more provocative and unsettling picture, which was the surprise winner of the 2021 Palme d’Or. A body-horror psychodrama about the fluidity of identity, Titane, French for Titanium, is the story of Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), an introverted erotic dancer who, as a child, suffered a car accident that required the rebuilding of her skull. But even before the accident, Alexia seemed more interested in vehicles than people. When we pick up with her as an adult, she’s transitioning into the role of a serial killer, fending off both unwanted sexual advances from creeps and desirable romantic overtures from potential partners with equal amounts of disconnected violence. Then she has sex with a car, gets knocked up, skips town, shaves her head, and disguises herself as a boy to avoid getting picked up for the multiple murders she’s committed.

That’s just the set-up. The majority of the movie focuses on Alexia’s relationship with a grieving father named Vincent (Vincent Lindon), an ageing firefighter captain longing for the return of his lost son. The relationship is touching, though we’re constantly on edge watching it unfold, as the foundation on which they build their connection is not exactly stable (and neither are either of them). Both Rousselle and Lindon give bold performances with all kinds of surprising turns.

Ducournau is clearly a devotee of David Cronenberg, but in this film, unlike Raw, she rejects the logical and linear narratives of Cronenberg’s work in favor of something more inconsistently surreal. Titane isn’t a dream-film; it’s more of a collage of themes and ideas wound around a semi-coherent narrative. Yet Ducournau devotes so much time to developing the semblance of a traditional movie plot, it becomes frustrating when events don’t line up. This is obviously not an issue for the director, who wants to get us thinking more than tell us a story, but I might have thought a great deal more about what this film provoked in me had the characters been provided in a more solidly structured container to bang around in.