Julia Ducournau’s feature-length directorial debut, Raw, contains gory car crashes and family dynamics whose utter depravity proves eerily relatable, and the filmmaker’s follow-up, Titane, expands on the French filmmaker’s idiosyncratic interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration. The film also ratchets up Raw’s combination of body-horror explicitness and art-film abstraction, making for a wild ride through a female serial killer’s techno-sexuality that would make J.G. Ballard blush.
Within Titane’s first half hour, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) realizes the fantasies of the characters in Ballard’s Crash when she has sex with a souped-up sedan that appears to manifest in the garage of the show room where she works as an exotic dancer. The exact, well, methodology of the intercourse is unclear, but we get plenty of shots of the sedan’s broad front end bouncing up and down like it’s being powered by hydraulic pumps. As in Crash, both the novel and David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation, this sexual encounter is rooted in a near-death experience in an accident, one which left Alexia with the metal plate in her skull.
At question early on in Titane is the way bodies become seen as machines, instrumental objects with components and fluids onto which we project our desires. Alexia’s role as a dancer who gyrates on top of expensive vehicles makes her into a sexual object for the men who flock to watch her, but for Alexia it’s clearly always been about a fusion with the metal. Ducournau illustrates this early on with an utterly hypnotic, flagrantly male-gazey sequence scrutinizing the parts of the woman’s scantily clad, writhing body in the same way that the opening shot takes us through a roaring engine. As the seductive grinding gives way to obsessive licking, it becomes clear that Alexia isn’t satisfying any kind of conventional exhibitionist streak. If she’s parading something, it’s her desire for the embrace of the inorganic.
The almost mute Alexia gets to realize her lifelong desire to fully embrace the machine (in the aforementioned sex scene) minutes after she’s murdered a stalkerish fan using a hair stick. This proves to be her weapon of choice as she goes about obliterating any kind of warm, organic life that tries to make contact with her—a lurid illustration of Freud’s concept of the death drive. After her murders grow out of control, she goes on the lam, disguising herself as a long-missing teenage boy in a sequence that involves a breast binding, an improvised haircut, and the shudder-inducing breaking of her nose. Alexia’s comically unlikely escape to a firehouse that’s under the command of Vincent (Vincent Lindon), its musclebound captain and bereaved father of the missing boy who Alexia is pretending to be, turns the film into a grotesquely overwrought, sensorially intense family melodrama about mutual acceptance.
While Raw also surprisingly evolves into a story of sisterly solidarity in the shadow of troublesome family legacies, the melding of body horror and daddy-daughter bonding in Titane is more of an abrupt left turn, narratively speaking. Via Alexia’s surprisingly effective assuming of the guise of a teenage boy, we almost enter a new film, though Ducournau depicts the space of the fire station and the erotically charged filial and paternal relationships that course through it with the same heightened attention to overwhelming sensations and strange configurations of the body as in Titane’s first act. Clenched faces and buttocks abound as Vincent and Alexia navigate their new relationship, and Alexia desperately, mutely tries to play the part of the traumatized son while masking the markers of her true identity.
This performance becomes increasingly difficult, as Alexia, occasionally leaking motor oil from a number of orifices, appears to have gotten pregnant by the sedan that she had sex with earlier in the film, and the pregnancy is advancing at an inhuman pace. However much some of Raw’s scenes verged toward the hallucinogenic, that film stuck within the bounds of a more or less familiar reality. But all bets are off in Titane, an all-consuming nightmare of a film where the question of whether we’re watching events in a real world or merely Alexia’s inner fantasy of fusing with the machine becomes irrelevant after a certain point.
The pure audiovisual trippiness of Titane’s final two thirds is welcome—in particular an excursus into the bodily dangers of fire zones and an enigmatic, homoerotic sequence featuring Vincent’s firefighters dancing in slow motion to a Future Islands song. And the film’s exploration of corporeal transformations both willed and unwelcome—based in the alchemy of flesh, gender, and the desire for inorganic hardness—makes for some imagery that taps into deep anxieties about the uncanniness of inhabiting the fluid-filled sack that we call a body.
After the conflagration- and murder-filled jolts of the opening act, though, it’s a tad disappointing that Ducournau’s wild ride of a film ends where it does. It’s not that Vincent, an aging steroid addict desperately holding onto his hard body as time threatens to soften it, doesn’t hold his own as a character. It’s also not that Alexia’s private terror at her expanding, veiny belly (which may be filled entirely with titanium) doesn’t constitute one of horror’s more novel articulations of the strangeness of pregnancy. But the opening scenes depicting the genesis of Alexia’s fixation and her initial rampage of eroticized violence possess an energy and inventiveness that the remainder never matches, despite its consistently rich, fiery look and fleshy sound design. Titane can accelerate from zero to 60 pretty quickly, but sometimes, despite all of its flashy decals, it feels like it’s just cruising.
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