Fantastic Fest 2021: "TITANE" Is A Deliciously Demented Tale Of Love
The latest twisted vision from French writer/director Julia Ducournau had Fantastic Fest audiences revved up for its U.S. premiere, and man, oh man, is it a torqued up treat! Fasten your seatbelts and hold on tight because this deliciously demented and surprisingly sweet no-brakes tale of love and parenthood is gonna take you for one helluva wild and crazy ride.
Following a series of unexplained crimes, a father is reunited with the son who has been missing for 10 years.
Car fetishes, cold-blooded killers, and family reunions collide in Julia Ducournau’s TITANE, resulting in twisted metal and fiery flame. The film earned Ducournau the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (which made her the 2nd female to ever receive the festival’s top prize!), and it’s easy to see why. It’s an astounding achievement that pushes boundaries, challenges taboos, and transcends genre. It’s easily one of the most thrilling and messed up films to grace cinemas this year, and it should absolutely be seen on the biggest screen possible. You need to hear the gasps and maniacal giggles it elicits from a crowd, and feel the rumble of its tremendous score and sound design.
Gleefully grotesque and beautifully bizarre, Ducournau concocts another visceral vision, tender and raw, that provokes physical and emotional responses. Once again, she minces genres to explore what it means to be meat in the most extreme and touching ways. Raw melded cannibalism with the coming-of-age genre, but Ducournau pushes things even further with TITANE, blending slasher, pregnancy body horror, and found-family drama into a wickedly potent elixir about love and parenthood.
The film oozes sexual energy (amongst other things), and like Raw, it also centers around a woman driven by a strange desire, which ultimately leads toward a ghastly transformation. (In fact, there seems to be a literal intersection between both works; Garance Marillier’s character from Raw, Justine, makes a small cameo). The strange desire here is the urge to kill, and when we first meet TITANE’s Alexia (Agathe Rousselle in her debut role), she’s emotionless and cold, completely devoid of humanity. A late night tryst with a flame-covered low rider changes all that though, and it serves as the catalyst to her warped metamorphosis.
When her murderous tendencies get out of hand, she makes an unexpected transformation which connects her to a fire fighter named Vincent (played by one of France’s biggest stars, Vincent Lindon) who has been struggling with the loss of his son. He’s so desperate to be a father that he wants to turn anyone around him into a son — and that includes Alexia. It’s at this point that the film pivots toward found-family drama, but it never loses steam, loosens its grip, or suddenly veers into a conventional direction. It remains its own machine through and though, and despite its constantly leaking fluids, Ducournau keeps everything marvelously well oiled.
In particular, she exhibits wonderful staging and blocking here. The film only uses dialogue sparingly, and Ducournau tells us a wealth of information about the characters through the way she places them and moves them around in a scene. She has a beautiful fascination with human bodies and how they move, and she uses dancing a lot throughout (similar to Beau Travail) to convey emotion and love where words just wouldn’t do justice. She also does an excellent job foreshadowing Alexia and Vincent’s relationship and uniting the motifs of fire and metal, which represent Vincent’s profession and burning desire to be a parent and Alexia’s mechanical coldness. When the pair finally tear down all the barriers between one another, the film reaches a strange and beautiful climax.
With TITANE, Ducournau continues to prove she’s a titan of body horror. She eloquently fuses elements of David Cronenberg and Claire Denis into a singular new flesh that’s bursting with kink and smoothed over with a strange sweetness. She creates scenes that sizzle with discomfort (in the best possible ways). She perfectly mixes gore, sound design, and clever camera moves to give each violent, depraved moment a fiery torque.
The film is not for the squeamish. There will be several moments that you’ll want to look away, but like driving past a car crash, you won’t be able to take your eyes of it. Ducournau keeps you so glued to the insanity that you’ll be peeking through your fingers so you don’t miss a thing. It’s boldly directed, brilliantly performed, excellently scored, and dementedly funny. Your jaw will drop. Your breath will be taken away. You will be utterly transfixed. To say anymore would spoil the experience, and we’ve already said too much.
Recommendation: If you’re a fan of Julia Ducournau or love boundary-pushing cinema, TITANE is a must watch. It’s an astounding achievement that will have you utterly transfixed. Easily one of the year’s best films.
Rating: 5 surgical scars outta 5.
Hungry for more Julia Ducournau?! Check out the links below:
TITANE Q&A w/Julia Ducournau from Fantastic Fest
Raw review
Five Fun Facts About Raw
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!