A woman shares a bondage-style sex scene with a car; a group of firemen wile out on an impromptu dancefloor; a man has his child’s skull fitted with a metal plate; many people are stabbed through the skull with a deadly hairpin—these are just some of the parts of Julia Ducournau’s lurid, sickeningly violent, mysterious, trashy, and beguiling new film, Titane, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. If you are able to stomach the orgy of violence unleashed in its opening half-hour, you may find yourself oddly hypnotized by this deranged fairytale, whose every step—including its missteps—is brazen.
As the film begins, a headstrong young girl is tormenting her father on a car journey while he tries to ignore her—alternately humming and kicking him—before an inevitable accident, which sees her head kitted out with the aforementioned steel plate. Flash-forward several years, and the young woman, Alexia, is now a terse, punky dancer at a car show-cum-strip joint, all gaudy pinks and flashing lights. Ducournau’s camera flits around this orgiastic environment in a whirligig of debauchery, her loud score honking deafeningly as she seizes the whiff of danger here, and captures, too, her protagonist’s glaring lawlessness. Played by Agathe Rousselle with devil-may-care abandon, Alexia is defiant and fearless, and soon turns to murder in a sudden, gut-wrenching excess of violence. Later, a news report informs us that the young woman isn’t on her first kill—and she doesn’t stop there.
All of this—the naturalistic scene of the child and father that turns to nightmare; the cold, ferrous Cronenbergian tones of the child’s operation; the turbo-De Palma dystopia of the car show and its attendant violence—is fed to us in quick succession, with a directorial tone that feels almost scornful. These opening scenes are undoubtedly calculated to shock, and shock they do: this sustained assault on the audience’s senses and taste has the effect of rewiring our minds, preparing us for the further twists that are in store. Whether all of this is particularly well conceived is debatable: in particular, the truly gruesome and extensive violence of the murders that we witness feels like a distraction, an indulgence, which ultimately contributes little to the film’s project. At the same time—for instance, when Alexia pauses mid-killings to wipe her brow and pronounce herself exhausted—Titane displays a shrugging humor, which tells you how confident its director is feeling. That vibe does not accord all that well with later elements, but who’s to complain when a director is having her cake and eating it?
Following this spate of murders, Titane takes another turn, launching into its story proper, as Alexia—seeking to evade the national hunt for the serial killer—cuts her hair and passes herself off as Adrien, the long-missing son of Vincent (Vincent Lindon, going toe to toe with Rousselle for commitment, even if he isn’t required to go to such great lengths as her), a steroid-addicted firefighter in middle age. The twisted bond that develops between these two misguided beings forms the heart (if that’s the right word) of the movie. Here, in the firefighting unit—where a group of young and absurdly handsome firemen live, cook, and dance together, filmed by Ducournau like an erotic fever dream—the director stages an audacious depiction of violence, sexuality, and performed masculinity. Adrien/Alexia is tormenting his/her body, plying it to an iron will; the person they have become is broadly accepted as male by all, including by Vincent, the head of the unit. What is Vincent’s agenda? Does he truly believe that this damaged being is his departed son? Ducournau derives a kind of bewildered comedy from this set-up, as well as a great deal of discomfort, probing insistently at our understanding of gender, sexuality, identity, and family. The director is whip-smart in drawing parallels between Alexia, performing the role of Adrien, and the cis firefighters exhibiting masculinity of their own, with a more comradely, joshing, socially accepted violence forming a bond between them, where Alexia/Adrien’s bloodthirst stems from hurt and only alienates them further.
Ducournau stages a series of scenes that range from breathtaking to tiresome in their constantly amped-up fervor. It’s scarcely possible for anything recognizably human to break through this torrent of horror, quease, and loudness, and you may find yourself yearning for some species of let-up, for a moment of calm that might give us more of a window into these beings; one which would offset in some way all the scything, flaring activity that makes Ducournau’s cinema so alluring. The director has an obvious eye for mise-en-scene, evident in the dreamy slo-mo scenes of the firefighting unit gathering in dance, or in Adrien/Alexia’s struggle with their body, filmed in close quarters, lit with metallic overtones balanced out by a creeping, gloopy blackness.
Part of Titane’s daring is its slightness—following an umpteenth coup de theatre that brings many of its themes to a head, the film suddenly ends around the 90-minute mark, triumphantly, unapologetically, ridiculously, causing a punch-drunk audience to splutter as the credits roll. That was it? It’s over? Images and sensations from the film continue to bubble and spit in your mind long after the film has finished, however: Vincent lying prostrate in his fuchsia-pink bathroom, or a genderfuck dance atop a lorry, or a child licking a car with what feels, in that moment, like real love. Titane has chutzpah and pleasures to spare, if you can just survive being stabbed in the neck with a hairpin.
