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Friday, June 14, 2024

Titane (2021)

[Earlier review here.]

France / Belgium, 108 minutes
Director: Julia Ducournau
Writers: Julia Ducournau, Jacques Akchoti, Simonetta Greggio, Jean-Christophe Bouzy
Photography: Ruben Impens
Music: Jim Williams, Sixteen Horsepower, Kills, Severin Favriau, Caterina Caselli, Zombies, Future Islands, Lisa Abbot, Johann Sebastian Bach
Editor: Jean-Christophe Bouzy
Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh, Mara Cisse, Marin Judas, Diong-Keba Tacu

Titane is the kind of movie that raises preposterous to art form, asking us to believe things unbelievable, simply asserting that they exist, with a simmering undercurrent of trauma unresolved. Agathe Rousselle as Alexia delivers a profoundly harrowing performance, throwing herself fully into the body horror. As a girl Alexia is in a serious auto accident that requires a titanium plate to be installed on her skull. It tells us nothing, it makes no rational sense at all, but presumably that is the explanation for everything that follows, along with compelling clues that her father has sexually abused her. As a young woman she is working as a lascivious model at auto industry shows, making love to the vehicles under the spotlight if not using them to masturbate. She loves cars. Soon there is a scene—after hours, after the show and after most of the people have gone—where she seems to be having sex with a car, which has summoned her to the garage with imperious honking.

Fetishizing cars this way hits differently for me in the 21st century, knowing better what cars are doing in terms of carbon pollution—even in 1996, David Cronenberg’s Crash might still seem like an innocent boy hobby, like memorizing stats from the back of baseball cards. Identifying and stack-ranking car models as they pass on the road always felt ridiculous, at least to someone like me who can barely make out even the most familiar ones—Jaguars and Mustangs is about the best I can do, and even then I don’t always get them. But now it seems worse than a frivolous pastime, more depraved, decadent in the worst sense. The next thing we know Alexia appears to be pregnant. And she seems to be leaking motor oil.


It takes some work to sort out the events of Titane as they come at you. It’s a movie intended to bewilder with its rapid pace and outlandish developments. It is insanely fast and outrageous with spasms of extreme violence. Slowing it down some on my last viewing, taking time to figure it out a little, event by event, it seems to be a fact that Alexia is more than just troubled, but she is also murderous, psychopathic, killing without purpose. The first we see is a fan who could just be excited about being so close to her—or he could have bad intentions. She assumes the latter. Her weapon of choice is a narrow dagger she wears as a hairpin. Her method is a single powerful stab into the ear, which produces a suitably cinematic and grotesque death. But maybe it’s self-defense?

In a later scene she kills a woman she has just had sex with. It turns out there are four in that household, which Alexia only learns of basically one by one. This is played for laughs. Every time Alexia discovers another one she sighs and rolls her eyes and complains of how exhausted she is. She kills at least three—the first for no apparent reason and the next two because they are witnesses. One might have got away. Somehow this rampage is a light-hearted moment in the picture, accompanied by a blaring, sprightly ‘60s Italian pop song. Then she goes home where she still lives with her father and burns the house down with her father locked in it and hits the road.

At the airport, escaping, Alexia sees her likeness on an electronic wanted poster. She also sees the likeness of Adrien LeGrand, a boy who has been missing for 10 years in a celebrated case—we have learned of it by then via news reports. Adrien’s likeness shows him aged to what he might look like now. Alexia goes to the public bathroom and works on changing her appearance, cutting her hair as short as she can and corseting her growing belly and breasts with some kind of stiff bandaging material. Then she breaks her nose in another scene that’s hard to watch. She has decided to turn herself in to authorities as Adrien LeGrand.

The movie now takes an abrupt turn into its greatest implausibilities. The father of Adrien falls for the ruse and believes Alexia is Adrien, his long-missing son. Or seems to believe it. Vincent Lindon plays this man, Vincent, who is the captain of a tightly knit brigade of firefighters that seems to be operating on a kind of freelance basis. Lindon gets top billing in Titane over Rousselle, which I think is kind of nutty all things considered, but it’s true his performance is nearly as good as hers, and more actorly. The brigade he leads is all male and ultra-masculine. Every one we meet of them feels dangerous. But they also love to dance as a group, including Vincent, throwing down with techno music and makeshift rave effects, pulsating purple lights and so forth. Yeah, it's homoerotic. But at the same time they seem prone to homosexual panic. It’s not a comfortable situation.

The air of menace is already thick and becomes thicker as Alexia’s pregnancy becomes more and more difficult to hide. The men on the crew are figuring it out but, when they try to bring it to Vincent, he refuses everyone the right to speak to him about his son. The cognitive dissonance is obviously working on him. He is slowly figuring it out and we see, in scenes of firefighting, what dangerous physical specimens he and the others are. All the elements are thus in place for a slam-bang finish, which is more or less what we get.

I’ve probably already given away too much detail about it. Go take a look. Titane comes at you fast and hits you in the head hard. I was laid sprawled by the developments. It can be very hard to look at (and/or think about). The play with car fetishes is much less interesting to me than the play with gender and specifically male gender and what it means or might mean. It has surprising humor in places, but director and cowriter Julia Ducournau appears to be perfectly serious—not just about horror, as she showed in her 2016 picture about a corrupted vegan, Raw. I think she has even bigger ambitions. The finish suggests she may be thinking in the range of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wouldn’t dispute it can stand up to it in many ways if you’re thinking about human evolution.

Top 20 of 2021
1. Titane
2. The Worst Person in the World
3. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
4. C’mon C’mon
5. Drive My Car
6. Licorice Pizza
7. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched
8. Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel
9. Tiger
10. Horror in the High Desert
11. The Souvenir: Part II
12. Pleasure
13. The Green Knight
14. Bergman Island
15. Pig
16. Lamb
17. Last Night in Soho
18. The History of the Atlanta Falcons
19. Dune
20. Army of the Dead

Other write-ups: The Coldest Case Ever Solved

1 comment:

  1. "Yeah, it's homoerotic. But at the same time they seem prone to homosexual panic. It’s not a comfortable situation."

    LOL.

    ReplyDelete