Unlike Cronenberg, the manipulations of skulls and chests do not come with supplementary contortions of the film’s realism, like the hallucinatory instability of Videodrome (1983) and Naked Lunch (1991), for example. She relies on Cronenbergian body horror and Lynchian surrealism, complete with a mutant baby that holds a candle to Henry Spencer’s in Eraserhead (1977) however, Titane often limits these components to stylistic scaffolding rather than overriding aesthetics. Titane ends with Vincent becoming a father for the third time, after Alexia dies giving birth to a baby with a titanium spine and motor oil for blood… but it is fine, because as Vincent tells the baby, Alexia’s corpse and Ducournau’s viewer: “I’m here.”ĭucournau allows Titane to play out in an oddly straight-forward, matter-of-fact manner with narrative patience and structural linearity. Throughout this time, Alexia carries a baby after being impregnated by a car, which is anticipated by a life defined by the significance of automobiles, from working as a showgirl at motor shows to being in a bad car accident as a child, which resulted in her skull being fitted with a titanium plate during the prologue. Despite finding out that she is not his son but a woman masquerading as him - a disguise Alexia achieves by cutting her hair, taping her breasts down and (in one of the film’s most difficult-to-watch scenes) breaking her own nose - Vincent (Vincent Lindon) vows to keep caring for Alexia. In Titane, protagonist Alexia (played by Agathe Rousselle in her feature film debut) ends a killing spree by locking her parents in their bedroom and burning the house down, then assumes the identity of Adrien (a boy who has been missing for 10 years, since age seven) and becomes attached to the new father she is deceiving after he starts taking her to work with him as a firefighter. When talking about the subject of literary influence in The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, Harold Bloom famously declared that “Poetic influence is thus a disease of self-consciousness” while simultaneously claiming that this natural component of the creative process can ultimately lead to works that are “more original.” This would appear to also be the case with cinema and specifically Titane, which takes pleasure in drawing from the film canon and allowing its viewer to play spot the influence, but does so only to then sweep these allusions and references away and become something so strange and rarely seen that it is worth walking through. Ballard overtones (particularly the English novelist’s 70s works Concrete Island and Crash), the inescapable Fast & Furious vibes and the application of all of these to realist storytelling that elevate Titane to singularly bizarre territory. If Ducournau’s first film established a familiar coming-of-age storytelling framework only to transform its mundanity into something fucked up and depraved (Garance Marillier’s Justine is a first-year veterinary student who gradually turns to cannibalism), Titane inverts this trajectory, beginning as an arthouse serial killer romp in medias res but u-turning in its second half and becoming a surprisingly moving parental drama.ĭucournau’s tapestry of influences is notable (Leos Carax, Claire Denis, David Cronenberg, David Lynch), but it’s the added J. Perhaps predictably, the filmmaker’s second feature is even weirder, wilder and more indeterminable than Raw. In 2020, Ducournau herself made history at the Cannes Film Festival upon winning the Palme d’Or (inexcusably) for Titane, making her only the second woman ever to win the coveted honor. Released in 2016, Julia Ducournau’s Raw was marketed as a coming-of-age horror film: a description that barely pins down one of the strangest and least categorizable independent films of the year, one in which Barry Jenkins carved a path for small films by making history at the Academy Awards with Moonlight.
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