An artistic roller coaster ride between genre and gender identities: Julia Ducournau’s Cannes winner “Titane” comes to the cinema.
Sometimes you have to rediscover things. The chemical element titanium, for example, was introduced to the world in 1791 by the English clergyman and amateur researcher William Gregor. Only four years later, the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth came across it, who immediately gave it the proud name from Greek mythology. Techniques that made the light metal usable, of course, were not to exist until the 20th century.
Julia Ducournau’s second feature film, “Titane”, also reminded some at its premiere in Cannes of something that already exists. The close connection between body identity and horror, known in genre theory as “body horror”, plus an erotic relationship with automobiles and even transhumanism – this is also known from David Cronenberg. Or by the American film and video artist Matthew Barney, whom the Canadian inspired. But of course these elements are freely available in the chemistry kit of the cinema, and the 37-year-old filmmaker from Paris encounters them with a very special point of view. At the last Cannes competition, which she won with it, no other film could match the daring power of “Titane”.
First of all, there is a pair of actors, so attractively different that an almost unlimited emotional range opens up between their poles. Agathe Rousselle, non-binary, plays the protagonist Alexia and is a natural. You hold your breath, that’s how relentlessly Rousselle surrenders to Ducournau’s artistic vision – and it thanks it with an extremely intimate art of staging. And then on the other hand there is Vincent Lindon as fire chief Vincent, a character actor who can do everything, perhaps the best in French cinema. He was last seen in the film of the same name as the sculptor Rodin; with Stéphane Brizé he played – in “Strike” and “Un autre monde” – first a workers’ leader and then an industrialist. The amateur actress and the full professional – even such an unequal cast always resembles a chemical experiment. Roberto Rossellini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder knew what kind of fire can arise from such connections.
As seductive as a sultry nightmare, the film initially follows the surreal development story of the androgynous female figure, steely and at the same time fragile. You meet this Alexia as a pin-up model at a car show. Like a relic from a time of unbroken sexism, she lolls there on bonnets, patiently answering the visitors’ autograph and selfie requests. But then she reacts to the clumsy harassment with murderous violence. Even here, in the hyper-realistic violence scenes, the film enters a second level of reality. When Alexia sneaks back into the exhibition hall, she is having sex with a car. The pregnancy that ensues causes motor oil to drip from her breasts.
So much unreality seems too much for a drama located in everyday reality, but the form that Ducournau creates for it is surprisingly coherent. Conversely, the father of one of her victims feels no problem in taking in Alexia instead of the missing son. She ties up her breast and her pregnant belly as she pretends to be.
The filmmaker distributes equal signs in an unequal world. Man or woman, biological son or impostor, murderess or innocent child: if even the most elementary opposites can dissolve in the loving gaze of the other, then the genre boundaries of cinema are even more obsolete. What begins with gruesome murder scenes finds its way – in Faustian magic – from hell through the world to heaven.
The daring force of “Titane” can be dismissed as a provocative calculation and the cruelty of the early murders as deliberate moments of shock. But Julia Ducournau is not a second Lars von Trier and does not lure her audience into any experimental set-up. Her film is also not a horror piece that would take its audience by surprise with shock effects. Your vision is democratic enough to give us time to look away when we want to because it will be all too cruel. This is also an option in the cinema: you don’t have to look at every picture to be part of what is happening.
Sometimes it is films that channel social processes before they become common knowledge. The linguistic means of meeting gender identities without restrictions are still being disputed. What good does it help if androgyny can be traced back to ancient times when the titans were still a powerful family of gods? Every time period needs its own images for the all too humane, and this film fits in as an artistic contribution to today’s ubiquitous discourse. At the same time it is a film about the diversity of love concepts, also a topic that has to be removed from the taboo again and again.
Ducournau cannot experience this completely painlessly, but what it demands of us in the first part, it gives back in the second part – if not gold-plated, then in the best titanium.
Titanium. F / B 2021. Regie: Julia Ducournau. 108 Min.
