‘TITANE’ GOES FOR SHOCKS
The French writer-director Julia Ducournau made a promising feature debut in 2016 with “Raw,” a stylish, diabolically clever horror film about a young veterinary student who harbors a perverse taste for her own kind. With “Titane,” Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.
The film begins when a young girl named Alexia is severely injured in a crash involving a car driven by her temperamental father; her life is saved by a titanium plate that we see implanted with graphic surgical detail. As a grown woman — played with androgynous ferocity by Agathe Rousselle — Alexia moves through the world like a coolly detached cyborg. In the aftermath of the accident, she developed an erotic fascination with automobiles, demonstrated in a seductively filmed sequence where she and other exotic dancers perform at a car show .
Building a nightmarish dreamscape that Davids Lynch and Cronenberg would love, Ducournau puts Alexia on an increasingly weird journey that will involve unsolved murders, a hallucinatory exercise in gender fluidity and the denial and selfdeception of a middle-aged fireman named Vincent (Vincent Lindon).
“Titane” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, encapsulating why that festival can be simultaneously stimulating and infuriating. There is no doubt that Ducournau is an accomplished world-builder, giving her subconscious and imagination free rein and finding brave actors to give it life (both Rousselle and Lindon are terrific in roles that are often maddeningly underwritten and opaque).
But “Titane” is so self-consciously transgressive and weird, that it’s difficult to discern who it’s for, besides fetishists, freak-flag flyers and fans of auteurism at its most hermetic and solipsistic. As Ducournau ratchets up the imagery — which takes body horror into exponentially more graphic and sadistic territory — “Titane” becomes less an engrossing allegory or even arresting spectacle than an exercise in sheer endurance: How far can the filmmaker push her viewers before we look away in disgust or, worse, indifference?