Agathe Rousselle makes a sizzling debut in Julia Ducournau’s Titane
TITANE (TITANIUM) (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
New York Film Festival
Sunday, September 26, Alice Tully Hall, 9:00
Monday, September 27, Alice Tully Hall, 8:45
Wednesday, September 29, Walter Reade Theater, 3:45
www.filmlinc.org
Julia Ducournau’s Titane is a dark, disturbing body horror thriller about family, fetishization, and obsession, a pulse-pounding, high-octane mash-up of David Cronenberg’s Crash, Donald Cammell’s The Demon Seed, and Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, Titane features newcomer Agathe Rousselle in a revved-up performance as Alexia, a young woman whose life changed dramatically after getting seriously hurt in a car accident when she was a little girl (Adèle Guigue), having a titanium plate put in her head, an odd scar left over her right ear. The teenage Alexia is drawn to raging fires and the cool, metallic smoothness of cars. She has become somewhat of a star at auto shows, where she dances alluringly, touching and mounting cars like they are lovers, attracting a fan base of men who would do just about anything for an autograph, a selfie, or a kiss, and is befriended by fellow dancer Justine (Garance Marillier). But she’s also prone to taking out her long, sharp hairpin and stabbing people to death.
With the cops closing in, she radically changes her appearance — just try not to look away when she purposely breaks her nose — and pretends to be Adrien, a boy who has been missing for more than ten years. Adrien’s fire-captain father, Vincent (a stoic Vincent Lindon), takes her in, overjoyed that he has his son back. Alexia stops speaking and hides her breasts and stomach from Vincent — a belly that is growing by the day, leaking oil instead of blood, as something unusual seems to be developing in her womb. Despite her PTSD and addiction, Alexia tries to have a normal life, but danger lurks around every corner.
Writer-director Ducournau burst onto the scene with her 2016 debut, the FIPRESCI Prize–winning Raw, which involved vegetarianism, blood galore, and, like Titane, main characters named Adrien, Alexia, and Justine. (In fact, Marillier has played women named Justine in these two films as well as Ducournau’s 2011 short, Junior.). Body metamorphosis is a continuing theme in Ducournau’s oeuvre, and it is at the center of Titane. At first, Alexia is a tall blond with a body to die for and rad tattoos — one on her chest proclaims, “Love is a dog from hell” — but as time goes on, she is barely recognizable, her breasts sagging, her skin breaking open, motor oil leaking out. Alexia is often seen naked as Ducournau documents her change.
Vincent London shows off his bod and his acting chops in body horror thriller Titane
Award-winning French star Lindon (Welcome, The Measure of a Man), in a role specifically created for him, gets to show off his (dad) bod as well; he worked out for a year to get into great shape to play a haunted man obsessed with his abs, shooting hormones into his bruised butt every night to help him keep up with the younger generation. Where Alexia hides her body, Vincent enjoys being bare-chested any chance he gets.
Titane won the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, and it’s easy to see why. But there’s a method to its madness; Ducournau, whose parents were both doctors, is not just shocking the audience but making it look at things it usually would turn away from or think differently about, pulling back the curtain on gender and body issues and the relationship between parents and children. The fierce soundtrack by Jim Williams is bookended by two versions of the folk gospel standard “The Wayfaring Stranger,” about a lost soul on the road home to Jordan, to meet their mother and father.
Despite the nastiness that Alexia does, and she does a whole lot of nastiness, we continue to root for her, and not merely out of sympathy for her past. (We also forgive Ducournau her plot holes and extended dance scenes.) In a man’s world, she’s been forced to give up who she is. She refuses to be yet another classic car to be gazed upon, an inanimate metal object to be worshipped. In the end, all she’s really looking for is to be loved and understood.
Titane is screening September 26, 27, and 29 at the New York Film Festival, with Ducournau, only the second female director to win the Palme D’Or — Jane Campion, whose new western, The Power of the Dog, is the centerpiece selection for NYFF59, won the award in 1993 for The Piano — participating in Q&As after the first two show, before opening theatrically October 1.