TIFF 2021: Titane
TIFF 2021Julia Ducournau’s second film Titane is a daring and insane follow-up to Raw, featuring squirming body horror. The violence is a lot to stomach, and while challenging at points, Ducournau confidently tells the story of Titane, placing it at a unique point in cinema.
The element of not knowing what to expect is what makes Titane work so well. It is filled with surprising twists bringing everything to the perfect ending. The film follows Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a vicious serial killer who quickly falls pregnant after having sex with a car. In an effort to evade the police, Alexia poses as a missing boy named Adrien and hides with his father Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a chief firefighter. That’s as much of the plot that should be divulged because, again, Titane is at its best when one can’t figure out what Julia Ducournau is throwing at the script next.
Titane is an exhilarating film, but it takes the gnarly and cynical elements of body horror and pairs it with the themes of a wholesome drama. There is also the exact right amount of dark comedy to take the edge off after witnessing all the violence. Titane uses body horror to explore tortured souls connecting – the emotions shared between Vincent and Alexia posing as Adrien are so deeply felt and elemental to the film’s success. Vincent is aggressive and damaged but softens and becomes over-protective when he is around who he believes to be his son. While Alexia starts out lacking humanity, she eventually grows to care for the pseudo father figure in her life as she provides the longing for connection Vincent is looking for. Their connection slowly grows with time, with many scenes bringing them together such as Alexia helping Vincent with his medicine, or the pair doing fire drills together.
In order to not reveal herself as a woman, Alexia remains almost entirely silent throughout Titane. The way Rousselle can convey such emotion without any dialogue is awe-inspiring. One stand-out scene is when Alexia is trying it all to pose as a boy, going so far as to punch herself in the face and smash her head off a sink to break her nose. The desperation felt by Alexia throughout this extending scene keeps the audience captivated no matter how much one wants to turn away from the violence on screen. There are also themes of shifting gender identity in Alexia’s character since she spends so much of the film both being pregnant and posing as a boy.
Titane is a film about transformation and Julia Ducournau translates this longing for human connection in so many shockingly weird yet emotional ways. Peeking through fingers as one hides from the horror, the audience will find that Titane is so much deeper than one may think and perfectly combines comedy, horror, and drama to make one of the most intriguing films of the year.