Review by Zach Dennis
Titane is a film absorbed in hyperbole. Praises such as “Most fucked up movie of the year,” “an insane ride,” and “don’t know anything before you watch this!” litter the marketing campaigns and prepare viewers to have a visceral reaction. On the surface, Titane is a lot of those things – it’s grotesque, offensive and egregious. But I would also posit that writer/director Julia Ducournau is trying to convey a deeper message amidst the spectacle of the film.
In short, the film is about Alexia, who lives with a metal plate in her head after being in a car accident with her father when she was younger. Now an adult, she is a dancer at what seems like an auto show in town and can’t seem to keep friends for very long.
Oh, and she fucks a car.
Agathe Rousselle in ‘Titane’
I’ll agree with one point above: it’s good to enter this relatively blind because as the movie goes along, the car aspect gets sidelined for another series of sociopathic behavior that would make Evan Hansen jealous.
Ducournau succeeds at depcting the horror of the body. That was true with Raw, and with Titane, she adds the element of machinery and flesh pressed together in an unholy amalgamation. For Ducournau, the machinery of Titane is an extension of the flesh, working as what could be viewed as an improvement on the body.
Met later in the film, Vincent (Vincent Lindon) tries to enhance himself using steroids to keep his body at the physical level that mirrors the firefighters he leads. For Alexia, the machinery in her body is a combination of flesh and metal that could enhance a human so that they wouldn’t need to shoot themselves up like Vincent does throughout the film. Ducournau shoots Vincent’s shotting-up scenes with horror, and a bit of fragility. Will he survive this dose, or will it be his last? The way he contorts after the liquid enters his body says that the absurdity of a woman having sex with a car and then getting pregnant may not be that far-fetched. She isn’t destroying her body any worse than an NFL player does with the health supplements and steroids they use to become better performers.
Adèle Guigue in ‘Titane’
On the other side, Ducournau is also presenting a film about fighting through an attempt to change your body. Alexia shifts herself from a more traditionally beautiful woman at the auto show to a woman posing as a man with a broken nose in the second half of the film, and that fight to hide her true identity is a constant struggle for that portion of the film. Whether it is her ever-growing stomach filled with (really) a car-baby, or her signs of femininity that begin to show as she grows larger, this fight to keep hiding who she truly is becomes the struggle of the film’s second act.
At what point do we just stop fighting and allow ourselves to be who are body is telling us to be? And why torture ourselves to hide it?
Sure, Titane is filled with fucked up moment after fucked up moment. A lot of the movie has you squirming in your chair, but it isn’t there to just instigate discomfort for the viewer. If anything, Ducournau understands that the best way to convey this feeling of isolation and pain is to put the audience through the rigors of discomfort that the character is feeling. In this light, she succeeds.