With a little face bruising and some binding in the chest area, Alexia manages to pass for the long-lost son, aided by the fact that no one would know exactly what the disappeared boy would look like ten years later. This someone is Adrien, the son of single father Vincent (Vincent Lindon), who disappeared a decade earlier. Things become even more complex and fascinating when Alexia, to try and escape a very thorny situation from which it’s hard to return, decides to pretend to be someone else instead. The entire film works on this exaggerated allegorical level, so anyone complaining about any lack of realism or believability doesn’t understand where Ducournau wants to take the viewer. Here, Ducournau makes clear what most women would dream of doing in a situation like that: nip these awful aggressions in the bud as soon as they can. In the sequence following this, Alexia has an encounter with a creepily insistent fan of hers who confesses he’s in love with her though they don’t actually know each other. This impressive early sequence, shot, like the rest of the film, with a fluid sense of spatial depth, color and light by Belgian DP Ruben Impens (encoring after Raw), does suggest, through comical exaggeration, what women are up against in this world. That’s a first sign that things might be a little more complicated or less black-and-white than a male gaze/patriarchy situation. One of the dancers working there is the now grown-up Alexia (fresh face Agathe Rousselle), who is herself a motorhead as we’ve seen in the flashback to her youth. Both the cars and the gals exist to get the men present off, though they can only fantasize about and never actually touch the wares. It’s an aggressively heterosexual environment that’s been dialed up to eleven. Scantily clad female dancers gyrate and lick the hot wheels while male car nuts gather round and take pics on their smartphones (if they don’t get immediately hauled off for touching one of the dancers). But while Titane wants to shock and surprise - two things a lot of contemporary films seem to have forgotten how to do - it also wants to tell the strangely affecting story of two royally f***ed up human beings who, despite all the odds, and lack of shared DNA, share a father-son like bond.Īfter a quick flashback that explains how little Alexia got a titanium (the Titane of the title) plate placed in her head after an accident as a child, the film proper kicks off at an automobile fair that can be best described as a strip club with crazy cars instead of poles. In Titane, there are elements of body horror, female revenge films and pedal-to-the-metal car-obsessed movies (though don’t think the audience of the Fast & Furious franchise will be automatically into this film). Screenwriters: Jacques Akchoti, Simonetta Greggio, Jean-Christophe Bouzy Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Here, quite hardcore genre conventions are spiked with contemporary considerations of femininity, queerness and gender-bending to explore issues related to bodily intimacy and independence, sex and relationships in this new millennium. Looking at it alongside similarly adventurous out-there films - such as Ducournau’s own cannibal-coming-of-age horror film, Raw, Zoé Wittock’s Jumbo and Yann Gonzalez’ You and the Night and Knife + Heart - one could almost speak of an exciting new current in Francophone cinema that plugs queer concerns into genre filmmaking in punky and transgressive ways. The image of French cinema as mainly consisting of artily shot black-and-white movies about straight men smoking and having sex with their mistress(es) is dealt a final stake through the heart by Julia Ducournau’s brash and ballsy experiment, Titane.
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