Titane (2021)
dir. Julia Ducournau
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Neon
I feel like I should have loved Titane. Possessor was one of my top ten films of last year. Climax was a disturbing yet exhilarating experience. I might not be an A#1 fan of the body horror genre, but I can certainly respect and enjoy it. I need a little something more under the surface, however, than director Julia Ducournau has on offer with Titane, her follow-up to 2016’s Raw – a film I haven’t seen, but about which I’ve heard good things. With Titane, Ducournau has a lot to say, and that’s part of the problem. The movie never gels into a cohesive whole. It’s merely an excuse to stage half-a-dozen or so incredibly shocking and provocative body horror set pieces.
Those set pieces, tho. They’re a definite gut-punch, and I won’t be forgetting them any time soon.
Titane is about a little girl who is obsessed with cars. She grows up into a young woman who is really obsessed with cars. At least, that’s what the first twenty minutes of the movie is about. In the opening sequence, we see little Alexia in the back seat of her dad’s car. As dad drives along the highway, Alexia makes revving engine sounds, mimicking the car. She’s so insistent (and annoying), as kids can be, that dad first turns up the radio in an attempt to drown her out.
In response, Alexia removes her seatbelt, and moves about the back seat. Her dad turns to admonish her and insist that she put her seatbelt back on when he slams into a concrete barrier on the highway shoulder. Dad is fine, but doctors must put a titanium plate – hence the movie’s title – in Alexia’s head to save her life. The resulting gnarly, curvy scar – immediately above her right ear – gives the impression that her brain is exposed to the open air.
A decade or so after the accident, Alexia is now a young woman working as a sort of model at a car show. She writhes and twerks in provocative clothing on the hoods of cars as show attendees look on in admiration. Alexia is so popular that many fans seek her autograph after the show. Walking to her car after work, one fan, whom she earlier rebuffed when he asked for an autograph, follows her in the dark, empty parking lot. He forcibly kisses her, so she discreetly takes out her oversized hair pin – it resembles a metal chop stick – and stabs him in the ear; he dies after suffering a brief, intense seizure.
At this point, you might think Titane is a feminist polemic attacking the patriarchy and rape culture. And it is, until it isn’t. We discover that Alexia is a serial killer who kills indiscriminately. What I’ve described so far aren’t really spoilers, as they all take place well before the 30-minute mark. I haven’t even gotten to the car fucking yet.
I use that word because the movie requires it. It’s not “making love” or “being intimate,” it’s fucking. As Alexia showers at her work place, to wash away the slimy foam that her latest victim spewed onto her during his death-throes seizure, she hears a jarring sound from the car-show floor. One of the cars is beckoning to her, Christine style, and she investigates. She gets in, naked and soaking wet, and proceeds to fuck the car as it bounces up and down. It’s like David Cronenberg’s Crash, if James Spader had wanted to fuck the car instead of Holly Hunter after the wreck.
After that, things get really weird.
The movie then becomes a meditation on the horror of gestation and childbirth, as something begins to grow inside Alexia. One of the most nausea-inducing body horror sequences of the movie – and that distinction is a difference of degree, because they are all quite nausea-inducing – is one in which Alexia uses her favorite weapon, that elongated metal hairpin, in an attempt to abort whatever is growing inside her. (You know, the way Republican Jesus intended.) I have to assume this sequence – which isn’t actually that graphic; the movie leaves most of what’s happening to your imagination, often the most effective way to stage horror – is what reportedly caused filmgoers to faint and vomit during film festival screenings.
But it could have been the scene in which Alexia, on the run from police, attempts to disguise herself by breaking her own nose using a bathroom sink. That moment made me physically squirm in my seat. Hell, every bit of horror staged by Ducournau in Titane made me squirm in my seat. Ducournau delights in making her audience uncomfortable, and she is exceedingly successful in doing so, at least as far as this audience member is concerned.
But where Ducournau fails is in making me feel anything else. I think she also wanted me to connect on a human level with the relationship Alexia forges with Vincent, the captain of a firefighter unit. On the lam, Alexia tricks Vincent into believing she is his long-missing son Adrien. She does so by binding her breasts and her increasingly swollen baby-bump tummy. That plot point would be laughable, but Vincent, a devastatingly broken character, wants so badly to believe that Adrien has returned that he’ll overlook any evidence to the contrary.
The connection between Alexia/Adrien and Vincent, bizarre as it is, could have made for a powerful emotional core to the picture, but Ducournau sabotages that possibility at every turn. As Alexia, actor Agathe Rousselle – who undergoes an unimaginable physical transformation over the course of the film – forges a twisted family unit with Vincent. Actor Vincent Lindon – looking like the French version of Christopher Meloni – telegraphs the anguish in Vincent, but through a funhouse mirror. The dance that the two share, to The Zombies’ psychedelic hit She’s Not There, is by turns endearing, funny, and threatening.
I respect what Ducournau has done here; Titane is a sui generis work of art. But her movie tries to do too much. Body horror, rape culture, fear and dread of child bearing, gender-bending, and twisted family dynamics all filtered through truly disturbing bits of horror make for an ultimately unsatisfying experience. But maybe it’s only that wanting to fuck cars just isn’t for me. After seeing Titane, I’ll certainly never look at motor oil in the same way again.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Titane is aesthetically and artistically daring, but it doesn’t have much of a cohesive set of beliefs or ideas at it’s core. Ducournau simply wants an excuse to stage as many stomach-churning instances of horror as possible. On that front, she excels.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- It was interesting to see a horror movie from a female gaze perspective. Ducournau makes her main character very sexy (mostly in the early scenes, when Alexia is dancing on cars), but there are plenty of images of naked women that don’t satisfy the stereotypical male gaze.
- The bit where Alexia must perform CPR on someone and Vincent tells her to sing the Macarena for the right rhythm of chest compressions is an odd and effective bit of comic relief.
- Shout out to the band Future Islands! Ducournau uses one of their songs in a trippy dance sequence.
- Many critics have hailed Titane as pushing the boundaries of film art, mainly because of how graphic the violence is. My response to that is, so artists have to continually make things ever more violent to push boundaries? I know that’s dangerously close to the slippery slope logical fallacy, but I have to wonder where it ends.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- There were 12 or so of us at this screening. It was almost magic to feel the vibe in the room completely turn. It was all fun and games in the early going. Ducournau stages a few early moments of violence to provoke a laugh, and most of us did. It was the moment of the metal hairpin attempted abortion when the mood of the room completely changed. There is no other experience besides in a movie theater where a roomful of strangers can be that emotionally connected. OK, maybe a sporting event.