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.
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. Call it the French Punk Queer Wave. 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.
Titane
The Bottom Line Bulletproof. Nothing to lose. Fire away, fire away.
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). 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.
After 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. 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).
It’s an aggressively heterosexual environment that’s been dialed up to eleven. 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. 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. That’s a first sign that things might be a little more complicated or less black-and-white than a male gaze/patriarchy situation.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. This someone is Adrien, the son of single father Vincent (Vincent Lindon), who disappeared a decade earlier. 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.
(Spoilers in the following paragraph.) Their strange bond is utterly fascinating, as it gradually emerges that Vincent and his ex-wife might be aware that Adrien is not really their child, but they both seem to realize that the emotionally closed-off and physically devastated Vincent is better off with someone at home whom he can look after rather than alone. So there’s a mutually beneficial relationship for both Vincent and Alexia/Adrien, with the latter officially integrating into the team of macho firemen that Vincent captains for a living.
While their relationship is really the beating heart of the tale, Ducournau and her co-screenwriters, Jacques Akchoti, Simonetta Greggio and Jean-Christophe Bouzy, could have made their unusual, strongly metaphorical bond even more central to the narrative to create an even larger emotional ripple effect. As it stands, Lindon’s character is introduced later than Alexia, which initially gives us as viewers a very lopsided view of their rapport (it doesn’t help that Lindon is credited first, perhaps creating the wrong expectations).
Vincent’s fireman colleague Rayane (the charismatic Lais Salameh) also feels like someone who could have been a previous incarnation of an ersatz son for Vincent. But their relationship is too thinly sketched to really give viewers more information about what Vincent’s wants or needs as a human and father really are — information that would then be useful for viewers to uncover all the different layers of his constantly evolving relationship with Adrien/Alexia.
But that’s a relatively minor complaint in Ducournau’s ambitious second work, which is both richly cinematic and pregnant with nuance and meaning. There are a few shockers in store that will knock more traditionally-minded viewers sideways but that open-minded viewers who adored Raw, Jumbo or Gonzalez’ films will relish. Their films make one hopeful about what could define French cinema in the future, as they put a decidedly queerer spin on those French films of the early aughts that fell under the informal New French Extremity umbrella (Pola X, Baise-Moi, High Tension…).
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