‘Titane’ wants to change gears, winds up stalling
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, a procedure that leaves her with a shellshaped scar over her right ear. 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, writhing and twerking provocatively against the chrome and steel.
The scenes that ensue immediately after Alexia’s exhibitionist display suggest that all is not well with our self-possessed heroine. 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 self-deception of a middle-aged fireman named Vincent (Vincent Lindon), with whom Alexia develops an unlikely and disquieting bond.
“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
fliers 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 as Alexia suffers grotesque physical changes — “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?
As objectionable as movies that pander to the audience are those that indulge in provocation or pretentiousness for their own sake. “Titane” might claim to be about two lost souls whose bodies have betrayed them and who find solace in each other’s isolation and unresolved grief. It might be about societal taboos and Ducournau’s aim to shatter them. But whatever ideas animate “Titane” feel halfbaked and secondary compared with the filmmaker’s desire simply to make spectators squirm.
The almost wordless Alexia is particularly illserved by “Titane’s” genre extremes: As portrayed by newcomer Rousselle — a nonprofessional Ducournau discovered during the casting process — she’s a compelling creature, but always kept at chilly arm’s length. The result is a portrait of someone who never becomes more than an object of facile fascination. In automotive terms that “Titane” itself might appreciate, she seems perpetually stuck in one grinding, self-destructive gear. As for what drives her, that’s anyone’s guess.