Simultaneously the best car culture movie since Tokyo Drift, a grotesque body horror movie that reflects the best David Cronenberg ever made, and also an oddly hilarious and tender father-son movie, Julia Ducournau's sophomore feature, Titane, is the strangest film to play at this year's Cannes, and it's hard to see it not being the case when it gets a theatrical release. To even begin to describe what makes this a great film is to take away from the surprise of experiencing it yourself. So if you don't want to know anything that happens, know this is an incredible show of force from a director defying all conventions and expectations, a diesel nightmare of fire and metal, and an unpredictably fun time at the theater (though a drive-in might be more appropriate).
After making a disturbingly violent and sexy debut with her exploration of carnal desires in Raw, Ducournau's Titane similarly explores desires of the flesh, but also of the soul, as our main characters are looking for spiritual connection even in the unlikeliest of places. We follow Alexia, who as a young kid got caught in a car accident that left her with a metal plate on her head (hence the title), but did not take away her love of cars, literally and otherwise. Fast forward to the present and newcomer Agathe Rousselle is playing adult Alexia, who works as a model dancing at car shows.
Cinematographer Ruben Impens shoots Alexia's long dancing routine in a long take, focusing not on the horny men who come for the cars but stay for the girls, but on the eroticism Alexia herself is feeling as her flesh touches and becomes one with the metal of the car. Like a sexy, grotesque lovechild of Cronenberg's Crash and a Shinya Tsukamoto body horror movie, Titane is a film all about transformations. Bodies are as malleable as the metal that gets turned into the roaring, fast machines that Alexia seems to lust after. When we see Alexia hit the communal shower after the car show, Ducournau is interested in the beauty and malleability of the human body and the pain that comes with transforming it. Instead of focusing on the naked bodies of the dancers just for the sake of it, the camera fixates on tattoos, scars, metal plates, and nipple piercings that get easily and painfully caught up in someone else's hair by accident.
Of course, there is no bigger transformation than the one Alexia goes through after she is forced to be on the run from the authorities and hide by pretending to be the long-lost son of Vincent (an emotionally naked and powerful Vincent Lindon), a fire captain seeking to transform his own aging body by way of nightly injections to his butt to keep his impressively Gaston-like appearance. Like a darker and more stylistic version of Bart Layton's The Imposter, we see Alexia cut her hair, and even smashing her nose flat to impersonate Adrien. The more time Alexia spends posing as the fire captain's now-mute son, the more she seems to start enjoying her new body, as she and the captain form a strange yet unique bond of safety and comfort, resulting in a strange yet endearing addition to your Father's Day viewing list.
Ducournau has made a film that can be read in at least 15 ways, and all of those would be equally correct, playing with everything from body horror, to our need for someone to care for and about us, to being an emphatically queer movie where hyper-masculine, scantily clad firefighters are constantly dancing homoerotically while bathed in bisexual lighting, one that contains the most emotionally profound and beautiful moment of queer acceptance since Michael Stuhlbarg's heartbreaking monologue in Call Me By Your Name.
Despite the tenderness of the latter half of the film, or the violently gory first half, Titane is also surprisingly funny. Where Raw played the meeting of grotesque with the sensual, this movie plays with the comically absurd. Moments of hyper-violence are often the result of cosmic clumsiness, where the only way out is to burn, stab, and barstool-crush someone away. This is the same movie where the Macarena is used to help teach CPR and also where a woman posing as a boy starts stripteasing on top of a fire truck while a group of hypermasculine men look very confused and at least a bit into it.
Helping to make a thematic and atmospheric connection between Raw and Titane, Ducournau brings most of the team back together for another job, from Impens' hypnotic cinematography that channels Nicolas Winding Refn, to Jim Williams providing yet another electrifying score you won't soon forget, to even a cameo from Raw star Garance Marillier — who stars as a girl with the same name as her character in Raw, something I choose to believe implies a shared universe of sorts.
Sophomore features are notoriously difficult to pull off, especially when the filmmaker's debut left as big an impression as Raw, but Ducournau has done it again with Titane, a bizarre, funny, tender, sexy, gory movie about transformations and human connections that proves that Vin Diesel does not and should not get the monopoly on movies about fast cars and found family.
Rating: A+
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By: Rafael Motamayor
Title: Titane Review: A Mesmerizing Psychosexual Thriller
Sourced From: collider.com/titane-review/
Published Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2021 13:45:21 GMT
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