Cannes has long been a lucky festival for Julia Ducournau. After graduating from Le Femis, the filmmaker won the Small Golden Rail at Cannes with 2011’s Junior, a portrait of a young teenager undergoing an icky physical metamorphosis.
Returning to the Croisette in 2016, Ducournau took home the FIPRESCI Prize for Raw, her genre-bending debut feature in which sisters attending veterinarian college discover cannibalistic urges.
And now the French writer-director has made Cannes history, albeit in an untidy manner. The first film directed by a woman to win the Palme d’Or outright was announced in a chaotic fashion. Last July the official competition president Spike Lee mistakenly announced that Julia Ducournau’s Titane was the main prizewinner at the very beginning of the ceremony. There was much confusion in the auditorium. Upon realising his mistake, Lee put his head in his hands.
Nobody was more befuddled than Titane’s writer-director Ducournau who had to patiently wait until the end of the ceremony to collect her prize from Sharon Stone.
“On the spot, I was quite confused and in disbelief, to be honest,” says Ducournau. “We all had come together to restart the machine of Cannes and cinema. And it’s normal, that there were some quirks and some mistakes. In the end, I think it was a pretty enjoyable ceremony because it was not so organised and stiff. For the year that we’ve been through, it felt right that it was a bit chaotic.”
The film’s star, Agathe Rousselle, was equally taken aback by the Cannes announcement, albeit for different reasons. Titane (French for Titanium), an outlandish thriller that was greeted as the “most shocking film of 2021”, provoked gasps and walk-outs from several Cannes screenings.
'That collision between flesh and metal, but it's not just flesh, more like internal organs that comes from a recurring nightmare that I've had for a few years'
“I thought the film was going to be way more controversial, which was not the case at all,” says Rouselle. “Everyone seemed to agree it’s a great movie. I honestly thought that because it tackles gender and not really wanting to be pregnant and difficult topics – that should not be difficult – but are, that people would be challenged. But actually, people really seemed to get it.”
Rouselle watched every episode of Killing Eve, TED Talks on serial killers, and the movies Monster and We Need to Talk About Kevin to prepare for the role of Alexia, Titane’s wild heroine who works at auto shows as an erotic performer, kills people and has sexual relations with a car. On the run from the authorities, she poses as the long-missing son of a firefighter named Vincent, played by veteran French actor Vincent Lindon. Together they form a strange bond, while she straps down her swelling, pregnant body, and breasts that leak oil.
“That collision between flesh and metal, but it’s not just flesh, more like internal organs that comes from a recurring nightmare that I’ve had for a few years,” says Ducournau. “It was a dream that traumatised me, in which I was in labour, and I was giving birth to parts of an engine. And I was always very disturbed by that nightmare because I think somehow the proximity between this pure act of life and living and these dead metal parts was shocking. While I was very disturbed by it, I was also thinking that is a very strong image. And that I needed to do something with it. And actually, since I’ve done the film, I haven’t had that nightmare anymore. It was cathartic.”
For both director and star, a major theme of Titane is the violence that is innate to the female body. And, too often, to the female experience.
'I'm personally very disturbed, enraged, hurt by the fact that for real in life, as women, we are constantly designated victims'
“I have always worn my hair short and walked a certain way at night so I am not attacked,” says Rouselle. “There are not enough violent female characters, who are strong enough to reciprocate violence with violence. Women because we’ve internalised so much about this, about being victims. I hope that men see this movie and take out the fact that if you try to harass or rape or do whatever to a woman, she could actually kill you. I really hope that is going to make them think a little bit. I don’t wish for women to become violent. But I want women to know and see that it’s possible.”
“As far as her violence is concerned, yeah, there was definitely something that was incredibly intentional,” adds the director. “Alexia, at the start of the film, I knew would be an unrelatable character. But it was very hard. I mean, she barely she doesn’t have any emotions, she’s really cold. She has these weird kinks with the cars. Understanding her was not easy for me. However, I think that I tried to tackle her violence, not for the why of it, because I don’t like to psychologise that. I didn’t want to give any real reason for that. I think that women’s violence in films is very constantly justified, which is kind of infuriating when you think about it because it’s not necessarily the case with guys. I’m personally very disturbed, enraged, hurt by the fact that for real in life, as women, we are constantly designated victims, the moment you get out of your home, and you get into the public, public space, you are treated like a victim.”
Given the film’s outlandish relationship with body horror, it seems appropriate that Titane required physical transformation. Rouselle trained in pole dancing, gained muscle and various prosthetics – including a belly and, in a nod to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a scar shaped like a chignon. Lindon spent two years lifting weights for his role.
“I have known Julia for years,” says the actor. “She was a girlfriend of a friend. One night at dinner she said: “Vincent, I want to tell you something. I’m writing a script for you.” And more than a year later, I get the script and I thought: this is me. And I don’t want anyone else, any other actor in France doing this job instead of me.”
'I didn't realise my parents had influenced my work until very, very late'
Lindon’s performance requires more than the kind of heavy lifting one finds at a gym. Beneath Titane’s sensational and cartoonish sex and violence, lies a very tense, poignant drama about familial bonds.
“I am aware of the kind of films that I do,” laughs Ducournau. “But I also am aware of what I seek in the audience, and that I want to move the audience and that I want everyone to kind of like to feel vulnerable at the same time. And to try to surrender to the humanity of the film. I know how to make you laugh, but in the end, it’s harder to make someone cry. It means that I have achieved something. It’s the greatest compliment to hear because this is a film about love. I have issues with putting words on it. I think it kind of belittles the feeling, especially when you’re trying to talk about a form of love that is not just the story of an everyday couple you know and how they live together. It’s more like something mythological. It’s about an absolutely unconditional love that I’m not sure exists in real life. But who cares? The important thing is what love could be and what it could make us.”
Ducournau’s parents, tellingly, are doctors: her father is a dermatologist, her mother is (wait for it) a gynaecologist. Speaking to this newspaper in 2017, the filmmaker acknowledged a certain family influence on her work: “I didn’t realise my parents had influenced my work until very, very late,” she says. “But my work so far has featured a lot of bodies and the mutation of bodies. When I was growing up I heard them talking about diseases and I would picture them and fantasise about them. And I probably imagined them as worse than they actually were. I think also if you have family or friends who are doctors, they have a very practical point of view about illness and mortality.”
That sense of mortality was consciously hardwired in Titane: “As far as wounds, scars, hurt, is concerned, with my character’s bodies, I want to portray us all being vulnerable,” says Ducournau. “We are all mortal. And our relationship with mortality is part of the mythology of the film. For me, humanity is the whole grey zone you have in between life and death. The extremes obviously coexist and are very visible in what I do. I also like to play with dramatic irony. I like the fact that the character who was taking lives not only saves lives but is going to also give life. I love the fact that the more human she becomes, the less human she looks.”
Titane opens December 31st
