Fast cars and smashed spines abound in the first trail­er for Titane

While a for­tu­nate few gear up for the slight­ly delayed Cannes Film Fes­ti­val this July, those of us with­out tick­ets to the Croisette can allay our fes­ti­val FOMO with the steady drip of new trail­ers and pro­mo­tion­al mate­r­i­al that accom­pa­nies the bevy of world pre­mieres. Just this morn­ing, the gen­er­al pub­lic got the oppor­tu­ni­ty for a good gan­der at one of the Com­pe­ti­tion titles most shroud­ed in secre­cy, and most eager­ly awaited.

Julia Ducour­nau​’s fol­low-up to 2016’s Raw has been a long time com­ing, with pro­duc­tion put on a tem­po­rary hia­tus back in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, but the film titled Titane is locked in and ready for a bow at the resur­gent Cannes. The first trail­er for the film arrived online ear­ly this morn­ing, show­ing a whole lot – of skin, of fire, of action – while reveal­ing pre­cious little.

Left ambigu­ous by a trail­er com­plete­ly free of dia­logue (though that could be the clas­sic mar­ket­ing tac­tic of obscur­ing the fact that a film’s not in the Eng­lish lan­guage for as long as pos­si­ble), the plot con­cerns a child with a recon­struct­ed spine, a father (the great Vin­cent Lin­don) in search of his lost son, and a foxy car show­room sales-mod­el. A broad-strokes syn­op­sis pre­vi­ous­ly announced made men­tion of a string of mur­ders occur­ring dur­ing the film; maybe that’s what all the jags of con­text-free vio­lence are about.

In oranges, pur­ples, and sick­ly greens, images of unclear sig­nif­i­cance flip by – a row­dy soirée in an aban­doned garage, a man wrestling on a mat with a seem­ing­ly invis­i­ble assaulter, a vicious par­tial­ly-clothed cat­fight tum­bling down a stair­case. To the strains of The Zom­bies’ time­less ​‘She’s Not There’, sure­ly an iron­ic com­ment on one of the female main char­ac­ters, an ele­ment of the sur­re­al creeps in.

This trail­er arrives hot on the heels of news that Alti­tude and Film4 have acquired dis­tri­b­u­tion rights for Ducournau’s lat­est, promis­ing a release in the UK and Ire­land soon­er or lat­er to match the US run backed by NEON. For now, how­ev­er, we non-fes­ti­val-goers await the first wave of reviews, and maybe some clar­i­fi­ca­tion as to what this con­found­ing film is actu­al­ly about.