If you thought that Julia Ducournau’s debut feature Raw was a sensational mating of family drama, vampirism, and campus coming-of-age, hold on to your hat for Titane, a thrilling, shifting game of two halves and many more subplots and set-pieces.
There are shades of David Cronenberg’s Crash, Zoé Wittock’s Jumbo, and Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man about Titane, but the craziest Palme d’Or winner in Cannes history is wilder and trippier than any of these predecessors. The pre-teen Alexia is already humming to motor engines, possessed of a titanium plate in her skull, and apt to physical expressions of affection toward automobiles by the time Ducournau’s eventful prologue has ended.
As an adult, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) writhes and gyrates on bonnets at car shows. Her fetishisation of metal finds expression in stabbing victims with a titanium spike and in a sexual act she performs with a car, a union that leaves her pregnant.
On the run after a comically extensive murder spree, gorgeously and garishly shot by cinematographer, Ruben Impens, Alexia breaks her own nose and poses as Adrien, the son of soulful firefighter Vincent (Vincent Lindon), who disappeared a decade earlier. Vincent is happy to believe the lie, despite the fact that “Adrien” is quite obviously a woman; a woman who is pregnant by a car.
Strip away the body horror, feverish set-pieces, and fun with oil leaking from places where oil ought not to be, and there’s a touching family drama. In common with Raw, the outsized genre gestures articulate the outsized dramas and tensions that can define family life. The weird, wacky woman-machine mechanics equally parallel the splatter that characterises women’s bodies generally and childbirth in particular.
Rouselle, who is catching a big break at 33, gives the kind of furiously committed performance one might expect from a talented actor who has waited far too long in the wings. Her turn is the French Queer Cinema’s answer to Kathy Bates in Misery or Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. It’s exhaustingly physical under a mysterious robotic facade. Her deviant impulses and psychoses remain a tangled, enigmatic knot of dark hints. Her costar Vincent Lindon is equally dedicated. The veteran actor embarked on a two-year bodybuilding programme ahead of the shoot and exercises his acting muscles with similar determination.
The final scenes transgressively lob missiles at hetereonormacy, progressive values, and happy endings. Nothing is safe and nothing is sacred in Julia Ducournau’s delirious new world. Rev up and get ready to run over everything the hotrods in Fast & Furious hold dear.
