Unabashedly violent and full of massive concepts, this yr’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, “Titane,” directed by Julia Ducournau, has shocked its means into turning into one of many yr’s most notable movies. On Tuesday, the movie was chosen as France’s official Oscar submission, beating out Venice Golden Lion winner “Taking place” and “The Stronghold” in a aggressive race.
Solely the second girl to win Cannes’ high honor, Ducournau faucets into audiences’ style for blood — one thing her debut movie, “Uncooked,” had in abundance — whereas subverting the modes of arthouse and blockbuster horror. And she or he’s being rewarded on the field workplace, setting current information for each French-language movies and Palme d’Or winners.
In “Titane,” Ducournau’s essential lens is targeted on exploitations of gender and queerness. To that finish, there’s an abundance of physique horror that pulls on the bodily ache of being pregnant and abortion, binding and hormone injections. Ducournau, in her ordinary type, toes the road between fantasy and actuality with these warped pictures, which makes all of them the extra cringeworthy.
However it’s not simply physique horror — pregnant breasts engorged with motor oil, steel tearing by way of pores and skin, cranial fluid frothing out of a punctured ear — that’s inflicting viewers to squirm of their seats. The lead character, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), is a gender-bending, violent psychopath who elicits a good quantity of shock as properly. She views human life with the identical apathy as gender, which, in most horror movies, would require her to be the villain.
“From the get-go, I completely didn’t need to justify my character’s violence, and I didn’t need to psychologize the truth that she’s a psychopath,” Ducournau informed NBC Information.
“When ladies kill in films, it is rather typically linked to a trigger that’s defined. There’s a justification. Males might be inherently violent for no motive, however for girls it’s completely unacceptable,” she stated.
With Alexia, somebody who can kill with “no emotion, no justification,” Ducournau stated she needed to interrupt with the social assemble that ladies are designated victims who can’t or gained’t retaliate.
With pulsing music, minimal dialogue and loads of shock worth, the movie creates a world the place individuals can defy categorization and violence with out motive is at all times lurking within the shadows.
‘Reclaim[ing] the narrative over the patriarchy’
The movie opens with a violent automobile crash involving a younger Alexia and her father, who seethes with disdain at his daughter’s picture within the rearview mirror moments earlier than her head almost breaks by way of the window. He walks away unscathed, whereas she finally ends up with a titanium plate in her head and a harmful attraction to motor autos.
In dizzying order, the movie begins to unfold, layering metaphors on arresting visuals. Grownup Alexia, sporting a sci-fi head scar, slinks by way of a automobile present full of writhing ladies and sordid males to the movie’s seductive opening rating. Ducournau’s ability with choreographed chaos is on show as Alexia performs a stone-faced Dance of the Seven Veils on high of a flame-decorated hood, each ladies masterfully luring their viewers in. However, purchaser beware: Alexia’s enthusiasm for automobiles is matched by her indifference for individuals.
The murdering begins when a threatening fan who stalks Alexia outdoors of the present is shortly disposed of with a hair pin, paying homage to the ice decide scene in “Primary Intuition.” However issues actually start to unravel when, afterward, Alexia has what can solely be described as a sexual encounter with one of many automobiles and turns into pregnant.
It’s probably the most talked about scene within the movie and one which has been learn as its queerest. Elsewhere within the movie, gender and sexuality are expressed in additional typical phrases, even once they’re being subverted. However right here, heteronormative and nonheteronormative labels don’t actually apply.
It’s additionally one other instance of Ducournau’s explicit model of subversion: taking an emblem and stretching it to its most perverse and fantastical ends.
“This very lively, very devouring relationship with the automobile makes her reclaim the narrative over the patriarchy and makes her personal want prevail over an emblem of masculinity,” Ducournau stated.
The ensuing corrosive resident of her womb appears to set off one thing animal, reasonably than maternal, and halfway by way of the movie, Alexia is a daily Jack the Ripper. Because the our bodies pile up, she’s pressured to go on the run and types a plan to obscure her id and masquerade as a lacking individual, Adrien, whose poster she spots subsequent to her needed one.
Regardless of the apparent farce, the lacking boy’s father, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), wholeheartedly welcomes the return of the prodigal son, and Alexia finds refuge as Alexia-Adrien.
‘A personality that evolves past gender’
The Alexia-Adrien storyline is probably Ducournau’s boldest transfer in an already bold movie. At totally different instances, it feels provocative, callous and merely laughable.
In a ugly however darkly comical scene, Alexia performs selfmade facial reconstruction a la a rest room sink, the outcomes of which look nothing just like the Adrien from the lacking poster. This lack of resemblance turns into the movie’s longest-running joke, organising a slew of punchlines on the firehouse the place Vincent is the much-loved, much-feared captain.
The movie has additionally drawn criticism for using the trans tropes of binding and hormone injection to its personal ends. As father and son settle into the charade, they carry out rituals that assist preserve the phantasm: Alexia-Adrien binds to cover an more and more Madonna-esque physique ripping on the seams, and Vincent, an growing older alpha, injects himself with steroids that pulsate by way of engorged veins.
Ducournau stated the movie’s presentation of gender shouldn’t be a part of an agenda however reasonably born out of realizations that she had way back about her personal id: “that my gender was one thing that’s purely a social assemble and that it someway restricted me as a person,” she stated. Alexia is an excessive embodiment of that philosophy, having “no attachment to any gender,” as Ducournau described her.
“Whereas making an attempt to query and debunk and subvert the gender stereotypes, I attempted to additionally painting a world the place there are extra choices, and we truly don’t must evolve in two genders, that are extremely limiting,” Ducournau stated. “Having a personality that evolves past gender was completely regular.”
Ducournau stated this evolution was additionally key to the movie’s exploration of unconditional love, which she described as “love that may see previous representations and all types of determinism.” Though Vincent clings to the concept that Alexia-Adrien is admittedly his lacking baby, the pair’s bond strengthens because the veil repeatedly slips and ultimately falls.
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