Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Julia Ducournau
Starring: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Laïs Salameh, Bertrand Bonello
French writer/director Julia Ducournau's outstanding debut
Raw
featured a young woman with an obsession with meat. For her sophomore
effort, Titane, meat has been replaced by metal. Like another recent Gallic oddity,
Zoé Wittock's
Jumbo, Titane gives us an objectophile protagonist.
The inanimate objects that attract Alexia (first timer
Agathe Rousselle) are motor vehicles. We're led to believe that
she shares a connection with such vehicles due to the titanium plate in
her head, installed after a car crash she caused as a young girl.
Alexia has found a way to make money doing what she enjoys. She
performs erotic dances with cars on display at shows, and has amassed an
army of fans. She's also the serial killer who has been terrorising her
corner of France, murdering her victims with a hair-pin. Feeling the
heat, she decides to change her identity to that of Adrien Legrand, a
missing child who would now be in his late teens. After breaking her
nose, cutting her hair and shaving off her eyebrows in an attempt to
resemble Adrien, she is taken in by the boy's father, veteran
firefighter Vincent (Vincent Lindon).
I forgot to mention that at this point there's also the small matter of
Alexia being pregnant, having been knocked up by a Cadillac. This gives
her a bulging belly with a steel plate inside, and leaves her lactating
oil from her breasts.
For all the psychotronic madness of its opening act,
Titane settles into what is essentially a straight
narrative about a woman concealing her identity and the man who seems
willing to accept her, however transparent her disguise might be. With
Raw, Ducournau managed to skilfully combine the thrills of the horror
genre with a coming-of-age story, but she can't quite pull off the same
feat here. If anything, the film's more outré elements get in the way
and feel like an attention-seeking distraction. From a commercial
perspective it works, as I doubt many people would be talking about
Titane were it not for its more bonkers moments. But after
the maturity of her debut, Titane feels like a regression
for Ducournau, a movie hampered by its childish desire to shock.
Despite all that, there is admittedly some very good filmmaking on
display here. Alexia's early serial-killing exploits are executed with
aplomb by Ducournau, calling back to the best movies of the 2000s New
French Extremity movement. Comic beats are skilfully set up with
crackerjack timing and expert camera placement. A "oner" through the car
show is one of the more interesting uses of the unbroken tracking shot
technique, as unlike so many it doesn't simply follow the protagonist
through the space but rather veers away from her only to catch up with
her later – the skill here is just as much in what's happening
offscreen.
The veteran Lindon and the newcomer Rousselle share a sweetly
unconventional father/son dynamic that teases the more interesting movie
Titane might have been if it dropped its Cronenbergian
façade. The central plot seems heavily influenced by the documentary
The Imposter, which I was certain would have been made into a narrative movie by
now, but Titane is probably the closest we'll get to such
an adaptation.
Titane proves that Ducournau is certainly confident
behind the wheel. I just wish she had taken us on a more interesting
journey this time.
