The first images of Julia Ducournau’s Titane surf the underbelly of a car as it barrels down a highway until the camera finds a screw loose, the first of a number of blatant metaphors for Alexia, introduced as an unruly child (Adéle Guigue) who causes her father (Bertrand Bonello), to crash and leave her with a titanium plate sewn into her skull. A leap in time finds that girl now grown (and played by newcomer Agathe Rousselle) and left with a sexual interest in cars, attending underground shows and dancing half-naked on hoods before, early on, strapping herself in the backseat of an old Lincoln and bringing herself to climax in a scene that would make J.G. Ballard proud. Much of the film takes place in the dark, but Ruben Impens’ cinematography regularly bathes Alexia in light as if her illicit activities always take place in front of headlights.
In addition to her paraphilia, the adult Alexia is also a serial killer, and her brutality often mixes with her eroticism. She makes the acquaintance of a young woman, Justine (Garance Marillier), by accidentally getting her hair caught on the woman’s nipple ring in the shower, freeing herself by callously yanking free and nearly taking the girl’s nipple with her. Soon after, she goes on a murder spree, culminating with setting her family home on fire and her parents with it. On the run, Alexia decides to bind her breasts, cut her hair and pose as Adrien, a missing boy she saw mentioned on the news. This brings her into the life of the boy’s father, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a bodybuilding firefighter who is so overwhelmed by his long-lost son’s return that he refuses to entertain even the slightest possibility that this cagey, suspicious person might not be the real deal.
Much has already been made of Titane’s shock tactics, of its auto-erotica and its moments of startling violence. And it is true that Ducournau doubles down on the gore of Raw with scenes that range from the relatively banal sight of a nose being broken on a sink to the elaborate body horror of Alexia discovering that her intercourse with cars has left her pregnant with god only knows what as she begins to leak motor oil and notice metal pieces in her body. But even these provocations are undergirded by a wicked sense of humor. The scene of Alexia’s dalliance with a car turns a low rider’s bouncing shocks into a garishly anthropomorphized display of sexual ecstasy, and the manner in which its headlights gradually blot out more and more of the frame until it all is drowned in white light is obviously an ejaculation. Alexia’s violence is often filmed with a casual, flippant tone that plays as mordant comedy, while the increasing body horror that sets in as her pregnancy develops manifests in ways as absurd as they are harrowing.
For a time, the film overplays its hand with possible interpretations, each paired with a pointed contrast that rapidly expands its sexual and gender dynamics. Alexia’s automobile fixation dregs up Ballardian comments on mankind’s love of its own consumerist creations, and her direct sexual intercourse with cars clashes with male gearheads needing to ogle women at car shows to displace their own confused erotic drives. Her early attempt to abort her pregnancy is matched by Vincent’s feelings of parental protectiveness and unconditional love. Alexia murders her own parents, only to develop a genuine (if codependent) attachment to Vincent. Vincent’s own behavior around “Adrien” even hints at a guilt that runs deeper than merely losing his son, with more than one subtle insinuation that his alternately temperamental and unsettlingly amorous attentions may have been responsible for the boy’s disappearance in the first place. Even the jokes feed into the sense that every single thing around the protagonist has relevance, as when Alexia sets up in Adrien’s old room and a poster of Queen’s News of the World, with its chrome-plated mechanical man, hints at the thing growing inside of her.
Just as the film threatens to be swallowed whole by its flurry of seemingly insistent metaphors and signifiers, its barrage of meanings and insinuations is suddenly clarified not as a means to overly explaining its protagonist but of deliberately overloading interpretations until meaning breaks down and avoids summary. Social conservatives have ranted for years about the permissiveness of society, but if anything, a great deal of well-intentioned empathy has led to a restrictive pathologizing of nearly all human behavior by armchair therapists. Alexia defies any attempt to ascribe motive to her, while the genderplay she gets up to as Adrien quickly scrambles increasingly limited discourse on that topic within the mainstream sphere. Transphobes are the ones who sneer about one’s choice of pronouns, but one can make the argument that the emphasis on labels is the endpoint not of liberation and acceptance but of the queer assimilationism of conservative LGBT figures like Andrew Sullivan, who gazed out over the transgressiveness of gay identity and decided that true self-actualization was the right to get married. Ducournau’s film trips all of its circuits, shutting down these reductive traits to free its characters to explore their contradictions and psychoses without limiting definition.
In that sense, while it is abundantly true that Titane owes heavy debts from David Cronenberg and Claire Denis, it could just as easily invite comparisons to John Waters, whose own cinema of the grotesque actively positioned social respectability as an enemy of individual expression. Perhaps the most shocking thing about the film is how tender it can be, a cri de coeur about taking people on their own terms and, in fact, not bothering with terms at all. “You’ll always be my son, whoever you are,” Vincent tells Alexia at one point, though if anything that statement is redundant, as the sentiment is written into Lindon’s sad, yearning eyes from the moment that Vincent sees Alexia. It’s also a tidy summary of the one true interpretation of the film that isn’t aggressively undermined by contradictions: that love is the only thing anyone can hope for in this world, and the only thing everyone equally deserves.
Photo courtesy of Neon
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