by Jason Adams
An inky black oil smudge smeared across a scarred face, big bosoms sway and heave, belly splitting up the seam, the space where sex begins to sound like a car engine revving up to eleven -- Julia Ducournau's Titane doesn't mince a breath of its runtime with anything but pedal-to-the-metal everything. Titane, the director's follow-up to her also-deranged (but somehow less so!) cannibal-drama Raw, won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes, a perfect signifier for the grease-fingered teetering psychosis of our age. After playing NYFF last weekend, it opens in US theaters tomorrow, October 1st.
And this movie, it is a lot!
As Raw already proved Ducournau loves a car accident (I can't imagine that David Cronenberg's Crash wasn't formative) and Titane offers up a doozy early on...
The crash leads to an androgynous little girl named Alexia getting a metal "titane" plate put into her split-open head. The film's tagline describes this titular substance as "a metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys." The fetishization of the robot space between man and machine starts right there and works ever feverishly outward.
Cut quick to years later and Alexia's now a stripper, seen humping the hood, the doors, and then in her private imaginations the insides, of a souped-up auto that responds in kind, bouncing its ass back to meet her; A romance writ in chrome.
Reality coming to meet our heroines (instead of the other way around) is a big theme in this year's cinema (see also: Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta) but ain't nobody's daydreams got shit on Alexia's. Even her name, part man and part internet-assistant, could birth a term paper of its own. Ducournau's film seems to have little interest in exploring a world outside of this woman's fevered understanding of it -- is there even one?
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When she starts strapping down her sudden bulging belly, a lightning-fast product of this auto-erotic commingling of hers, and killing off strangers with a needle-cum-car-antenna, we're right off with her into this separate place, all in. The occasional stranger stares on mouth agape, sure, but delusion's a choice we make and this movie's making it for us.
The bulk of the plot, once Titane thrusts its eventual way to it, is on the run from Alexia's crimes. She finds her way to a grieving firefighter who lost a son played with astonishing dedication by Vincent Lindon, giving performative masculinity a goose and then some. Alexia sees his grief and runs with it. She shaves her head, she smashes up her nose in in one of Titane's many, many, many shocking moments played for full on guffaws. Like something out of Shakespeare in Love she straps all of her womanhood down; performative femininity nothing but a heap of bleached hair on the floor. She becomes the weird little boy Vincent was needing, filling an emotional hole that the needles full of testosterone he sticks into his ass every night can't come near. And Titane in turn becomes a love letter to the lies we tell our broken selves to make the days better.
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I feel as if I've already given away too many of Titane's secrets just in these asides, which are best experienced in real time, one-on-one as it methodically smashes your face into a series of sink corners itself, a gleeful relish in its convictions to be whatever the eff it wants to be. Beautiful, sexy, horrific, a scarred supermodel dancing on a balance beam over a bed of flames, slow to the tune of its own half-dreamt drummer.
Titane isn't asking anybody to like it but some of you will love it, and I count myself among these same cracked and damaged folk. If I tell you it's one of the funniest movies of the year I can't imagine some of you not avoiding me in crowded or uncrowded places, but me and mad little Titane will keep each other company just fine. I just won't turn my back to her, if I'm smart.