Titane

There is an easy way to sell any cinephile on Titane: this is a dark­ly fun­ny mid­night movie; an amal­ga­ma­tion of capital‑G genre pic­tures; a sexy and strange romp where the struc­tur­al rug pulls beg to remain unspoiled and picked apart in equal mea­sure. None of that is wrong, exactly.

Julia Ducour­nau​’s sec­ond fea­ture is a total blast, sil­ly and tight and suf­fi­cient­ly gnarly, with sound design that allows a beat after every crunch for the audi­ence to gasp. What makes Ducournau’s Palme d’Or win­ner so spe­cial, how­ev­er, is that it is nev­er quite the movie you expect it to be. It opts, again and again, for the rich­er, more per­vert­ed, more beau­ti­ful path.

It does not put you at a dis­ad­van­tage to know the plot of the movie going in, though it is cer­tain­ly mis­lead­ing. The events, as laid out on paper, pro­pose an emo­tion­al arc that is dif­fer­ent to what’s con­tained with­in the work prop­er, eschew­ing entire­ly the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties that Ducournau’s cam­era brings to frame.

For now, what you need to know goes as fol­lows: after an acci­dent in her youth, Alex­ia, played by Agathe Rous­selle, works as a dancer in a mus­cle car garage, the trau­ma of her child­hood leav­ing her with a scar above her right ear and an erot­ic attach­ment to auto­mo­tive machin­ery. Fol­low­ing a series of hor­rif­ic events, she winds up run­ning away and dis­guis­ing her­self as the long-lost son of a griev­ing fire­man, played by Vin­cent Lindon.

It is impos­si­ble to under­sell the tech­ni­cal com­mand of form on dis­play here. In an era of main­stream hor­ror when osten­ta­tious sym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tions are all the rage, here is a film where the visu­al style is split five ways down the side, before col­laps­ing glee­ful­ly into a base lan­guage of guts.

Titane is not a hor­ror film, but it is unapolo­get­i­cal­ly slimy, full of cre­ative, mad­woman con­coc­tions of vis­cera. The vio­lence on dis­play is nei­ther moralised nor strict­ly provoca­tive. This is just good gore – an olive branch extend­ed to the gross out­casts who dig it. Need­less to say, the movie is cool as fuck.

Giv­en the sub­ject mat­ter, 1996’s Crash is the eas­i­est point of ref­er­ence, and an ear­ly nee­dle drop (‘Doing it to Death’ by The Kills) seems to place the film in con­ver­sa­tion with the con­tro­ver­sial adap­ta­tion of JG Ballard’s clas­sic nov­el. Truth­ful­ly, David Cro­nen­berg is noth­ing but a super­fi­cial com­par­i­son. The Cana­di­an director’s gore is ecsta­t­ic and sen­su­ous; Ducournau’s is pun­gent and rigid.

Pen­e­tra­tive vio­lence comes at odd angles: down the side of a ribcage; at the hinge of a jaw; stom­achs split­ting per­pen­dic­u­lar to stretch marks. Lac­ta­tion turns into pus turns into oil that clots and emp­ties along­side dense clumps of skin. The char­ac­ters of Titane do not know nor­ma­tive inti­ma­cy, and all leg­i­bly sex­u­al con­tact is met with recoil.

The open­ing hour is a descent into the touch-repulsed mania of a hol­low soul. Moments that would play as crowd-pleas­ing set-pieces in the hands of a less­er direc­tor buzz with suf­fo­cat­ing iso­la­tion. Like the best slash­ers, any pathol­o­gi­sa­tion of the severe-bod­ied Alex­ia falls to the way­side. There is an intu­itive log­ic to the first half of the film, where every ges­ture is loaded with the poten­tial for dan­ger, every wound becomes a retal­i­a­tion. Every frame is angry, fear­ful, fuelled by a pow­er born from demons that even the most des­e­crat­ed of bod­ies refus­es to name.

Ducour­nau is no stranger to dis­con­tent. Her debut fea­ture, Raw, was ade­quate­ly pri­mal, but unimag­i­na­tive – demar­cat­ed by a self-hat­ing horni­ness whose hys­te­ria failed to illu­mi­nate the hor­rors and lib­er­ties of puber­ty. Her fury con­sumed any poten­tial emo­tion­al range or the­mat­ic com­pli­ca­tion, a choke col­lar tug­ging against poten­tial insights on plea­sure and the very French mar­tyr­dom of female sexuality.

Titane does not solve for any pre­vi­ous lim­i­ta­tions of the director’s work: the bio­log­i­cal func­tions of cis women still keep a stern watch over any per­for­mance of fem­i­nin­i­ty, the spec­tres of New French Extrem­i­ty and Camille Paglia offer­ing qual­i­fy­ing state­ments on the film’s metaphors like the care­less insults of a bad ex. When Alex­ia writhes angri­ly atop a Cadil­lac near the begin­ning of the film, it’s clear Ducour­nau is going for some hack­neyed metaphor about the fetishi­sa­tion of parts (vehic­u­lar, sex­u­al), a dimen­sion of the nar­ra­tive that would be offen­sive if it were not so cartoonish.

The whole thing smacks of gen­der, so to speak. Any­thing direct­ly anal­o­gous, either to the ​“irre­versible dam­age” of tran­si­tion so bemoaned by TERFy pun­dits over the past decade, or the con­cerns of con­tem­po­rary gen­derqueer nar­ra­tives, feels inci­den­tal. Alex­ia tapes her chest and stom­ach down at sev­er­al points through­out the film, yelp­ing in pain and writhing in agony, her body pro­gres­sive­ly dete­ri­o­rat­ing under the strain. There is no sug­ges­tion that her pain comes from her repress­ing her fem­i­nin­i­ty, or her sub­mis­sion to mas­culin­i­ty for survival.

Ducournau’s script nev­er ques­tions that the main char­ac­ter is a cis woman – think less the befud­dled fram­ing of Brandon’s body in Boys Don’t Cry, more Viola’s play­ful schem­ing in ​‘Twelfth Night’. As we cul­tur­al­ly move away from exam­in­ing transness as med­icalised suf­fer­ing, there has arisen a moment of reflec­tion; it is true that the con­cept of dys­pho­ria, the dis­so­ci­a­tion from one’s own body and gen­der, a deep dis­com­fort with the hor­mones that coarse through a body like active tox­ins, is a uni­ver­sal expe­ri­ence shared by cis and trans folks alike.

Sim­i­lar­ly, while there is explic­it­ly queer sex, Ducour­nau does not sug­gest that as a salve against het­ero­nor­ma­tive struc­tures. Much has been made of the film’s ten­der sec­ond half, but it is worth high­light­ing how thrilling­ly opaque the dimen­sions of its cen­tral rela­tion­ship actu­al­ly plays out. Even call­ing Lin­don and Rousselle’s con­nec­tion that of cho­sen fam­i­ly fails to encap­su­late the total­i­ty of their love.

It makes the nature of queer­ness feel inevitable, some­thing dis­cov­ered by those even with­out the lan­guage for it. The per­pet­u­al­ly sub­mis­sive Lin­don gives him­self over com­plete­ly to the film’s rhythms, every breath shak­ing his lig­a­ments, the cor­ners of his mouth aching with grief. In a stand­out scene, Lin­don and Rous­selle go on a house­call and wind up per­form­ing CPR on two peo­ple simul­ta­ne­ous­ly across the room, keep­ing in time to a mum­bled ren­di­tion of the ​‘Macare­na’.

What could have been a moment of com­ic relief becomes a start­ing dia­tribe on emo­tion­al bound­aries and a new kind of close­ness. Ducour­nau veers away from expect­ed fix­a­tions, set­ting up punch­lines that are instead replaced by sonnets.

For a film with so much phys­i­cal­ly ground­ed imagery, Titane finds itself often flirt­ing with the meta­phys­i­cal, such as a late moment in which Lin­don acci­den­tal­ly engages in bed­side self-immo­la­tion. There is a ten­sion between what our bod­ies allow and what our desires crave that col­laps­es by the film’s finale, just as Ducournau’s lim­it­ed con­cep­tions of patri­ar­chal soci­ety col­lide with a rad­i­cal, anthro­pocenic queerness.

Titane is a gen­uine­ly weird, sweet thing, even in a time where those descrip­tors get thrown around far too much. There has not been a more sur­pris­ing motion pic­ture in years.