TITANE Review
She fucks a car. It’s all true about what you have heard about Julia Ducournau’s eccentric yet mastered TITANE, her anticipated follow up to the amusingly grotesque RAW. Again, it’s true: a young lady does have sexual relations with a car in this movie but that’s only just the tip of the iceberg for one of the year’s most audacious films. Amidst all the on-the-paper insanity, however, emerges a surprisingly wrenching tale of suffering and the strange ways we try to get over unimaginable loss whether that be through stealing identities or faking a family together.
Things begin simple enough as we see a young girl bugging her father as he drives down a highway. From the get-go, Ms. Ducournau has the audience in her grasp, dragging out this intro scene with a tight yet eventually suffocating pace until it quickly shatters into violence through a simple yet brutal car accident. The young girl and her father survive but the rambunctious kid is left with a large scar near the back of her head, in addition to seeming disdain from her father, both of which follow her into the present where, in one of the film’s most stylish and eye-catching sequences, we now see the little girl, Alexia, all grown up (played by Agathe Rousselle) and now finding a sort of emotional release in the writhing dances she displays at a sort of car/strip show she works at. With Ruben Impens’ graceful camerawork, we are introduced to the world Alexia lives in: a haven of cars and female colleagues and the gaze of a thousand lustful men all setting their sights on TITANE’s protagonist. It’s a thin line between heaven and hell for Alexia here but it’s all she’s got. While the film sets up some kind of unique “day in the life” type of film for Alexia, Ducournau takes a brutal and violent shift that eventually involves a series of comedically dark (and effectively brutal) murders, car fucking, and stolen identities of missing children.
For all this strange territory that TITANE sprints into, at times leaving the viewer in a whiplash that is mostly more entertaining than frustrating as we lick our lips at the suspense of just what crazy narrative turn Ducournau will throw at us next, Alexia’s journey eventually forms into something of a family drama as she soon finds herself pregnant and taken into the home of a steroid-using firefighter (played by the French version of Christopher Meloni, Vincent Lindon). On the run, out of options, and with something growing inside of her, Alexia has no other choice but to play along with this sad and lonely man’s dream of a happy family, leading TITANE to a surprisingly heartwarming lesson of the families that we choose rather than the ones we’re given. At times brutal, horrific, funny, and heartbreaking, TITANE is a witch’s brew that seemingly throws everything and the kitchen sink into the pot and unleashes a confident movie that gracefully juggles its wildly varying parts.
This is all possible of course thanks to Ms. Ducournau’s confident handling of the material. Like any of the great filmmakers, this film’s director not only realizes her off the wall ideas and narrative shifts but commits to them, bringing an authenticity to the film that makes its more outlandish aspects go down easier. Like it’s main character, TITANE is at times vibrant as hell, with slick camera movements and cheeky (yet wholly enjoyable) needle drops but at the drop of the hat, the movie isn’t afraid to plumb the pitiful depths of its tragic characters, who all the share the same feelings of isolation. Ms. Rousselle, as TITANE’s main focus, somehow manages to make her character, a truly flawed and violent creature of circumstance, into a protagonist that is just as easy to root for as she is to despise. For every outrageous moment Alexia finds herself in, Rousselle always keeps the humanity of the character in tact, revealing that even in the midst of a hot and heavy sex scene involving a firetruck, the audience can still see the broken and sad woman at the middle of it all. At her opposite, Mr. Lindon puts in an equally engrossing performance as the equally pitiful firefighter Alexia finds herself shacked up with. A man desperately trying to hold onto the strong masculinity that he views as the only way to diminish the loss of his son years ago, Lindon’s performance straddles the line between the comedic and tragic, with each line he delivers about “being a man” becoming loaded with a sort of beaten down sadness.
By the time TITANE barrels towards a conclusion that brings these two broken people together in the strangest of ways, you won’t know whether to laugh or cry. You may do both. Therein lies the true accomplishment of TITANE. While nowadays a lot of films are diagnosed as hybrid films mixing genres together to form something unique, Ducournau’s work is truly a hybrid: a one of a kind beast of immaculate conception that juggles all of its genre shifts with not only skill but an unmatched revelry.
4.5/5
