Titane sheds light on maverick director’s controversial style
CANNES: French film director Julia Ducournau, who on Saturday won the Cannes festival’s top prize for Titane, developed a taste for skin-crawling bodily transformations early on in life thanks to her parents, both doctors.
Exploding into the spotlight at just 34 with her debut feature film Raw, Ducournau quickly established herself as a singular and audacious filmmaker.
The coming-of-age tale with a gory twist, featuring a teenage vegetarian who finds she likes human flesh and blood, brought critics close to fainting when it was shown at the 2016 Cannes festival.
The impact of Titane, about a young woman who has sex with cars and kills without a care, was much the same, with critics shielding their eyes during several scenes.
Getting a horror film shortlisted for the top prize at Cannes was in itself a success, she told AFP during the first week of the festival. “I’ve always wanted to bring genre cinema or outlandish films to mainstream festivals so this part of French movie production would stop being ostracised,” she said.
The polished appearance of Ducournau, now 39, appears in stark contrast to the messy array of gore seen in her films.
The Paris-born daughter of a dermatologist father and a gynaecologist mother, both film lovers, suggests her fascination with some of the most disturbing aspects of the human body has deep roots.
“Even as a little girl, I would hear my parents talk about medical topics without taboo. That was their job. I liked to stick my nose in their books,” she said while promoting Raw.
Ducournau was visibly pleased at Cannes’s Titane news conference when a critic compared her film to David Cronenberg’s Crash and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. She also cites Brian de Palma, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Na Hong-jin as influences.
When she was only six, she watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in secret and, growing up, devoured the chilling gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
Ducournau was a brilliant student, earning a double degree for French literature and English before studying scriptwriting at the prestigious Femis film school in Paris.