Cut to the grown young woman Alexia, wading through the crowd at a car show and taking her place as one of the fetish dancers the all male con goers gahter around. Gyrating and insinuating around the bonnet of a masterpiece flame finish of a sleek Cadillac, she elicits the pleas from the crowd for autographs. After the show she is pursued by another fan who takes things so far over the line that she dispatches him with sudden and decisive violence. After that her cleansing shower is interrupted by a banging at the door. Investigating, naked, she sees that the Cadillac from the show has also followed her out and is bucking like a stallion. She gets in and what follows might make you think of David Cronenberg's adaptation of Crash but should remind you more of sculptor Matthew Barney's excursions into film and body horror. Concealing this from everyone in her life, she goes to a party where a woman she is attracted to resists her foreplay for its painful violence. What happens next drives Alexia into fugitive life, and eventually, after some serious appearance alterations, is claimed by a fire chief as his long lost son.
Yep, all that in the first act and I'm leaving lots out. But that is where I'm leaving most of the details out as too much of this film is too easily spoiled. If you recall Raw, the film about a student vet whose veganism is torn from her in a self-surprising hazing ceremony, you might recall the name of its writer/director, Julia Ducournau. Well, she's back. And if you thought that such an audacious piece could only be a one off like Donnie Darko recall that many considered Eraserhead the same way.
Alexia's trek takes her from a sexualised subculture, through her experiences revealing her own liminal sexuality and into the strange realm of the fire station, its crew of high-machismo men, where she is accepted as one of them, secreting the oil around the bulging metal uterus that her pregnancy to the Cadillac has left her. Through undeclared rites and shows of muscle, protected by the fire chief himself, Alexia's life becomes a rerun not only of Beau Travail but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (as Gaspar Noe might have imagined them). The continued violence is not the kind where an A-Lister dives off a skyscraper as played by a stunt double, it is intimate, grinding and in more than one sense stunning. Maybe add a pinch of Tetsuo the Iron Man here. Extreme cinema as magical realism (you can confidently reverse that, in this case, btw)
As soon as you might be thinking, just go with it, the themes so appear and start to weave. Just as notions of predetermination and culture consolidated in Raw to give us a weirdly uplifting finale, so too Titane conjures gravity from its absurdist premise. This time, though the gravity smacks of genuine tragedy.
Ducournau dresses this in the neon of the car show and the sweat-coated bleach of the fire station and fills us with music from speaker-rattling EDM to '60s oldies (there is a scene that makes great use of The Zombies' She's Not There) and the sense that what we are seeing and hearing have been designed to the last pixel. That said there is nothing but organic movement at the centre of this bizarre tale and it might have collapsed under its own specialness but for the committed central performance by Agathe Rouselle whose initial contained wildness must combat an intensification at industrial levels.
Most of her performance is physical (she might have as few as twenty lines) and much of it after her character has violently changed her look. It is impossible not to feel for her, regardless of what she has already done. As the fire crew breathe around every corner, through every door jamb her protection is only guaranteed by her nominal father whose own repsonse to her real identity if revealed feels dangerously like an x, y or z. Vincent Lindon as the chief is himself on a tightrope of control and dependancy. He plays a strong man but one whose worldliness offers promise. That we don't know until the last moment what this will add up to is testament to Ducournau's mastery and singularity of vision.
Titane is already in my 2021 top ten for its boldness and newness. It is a difficult film to approach and there are scenes that some viewers might justly find unbearable. I can get squeamish myself (for all my deacdes of horror fandom) but I emerged from this one with the same kind of relief that I did after Blue Velvet, Irreversible or Cremaster 3, the sense that I had just consumed something cleansing and baptismal. It's no coincidence that Ducournau uses the motif of fire for its appearance of being alive and its cleansing threat to life; that kind of acceptance is central in the end. Exquisite. Terrifying and confronting but exquisite.
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