Titane (2021)
Directed by Julia Ducournau
A woman with a metal plate in her head from a childhood car accident embarks on a bizarre journey, bringing her into contact with a firefighter who's reunited with his missing son after 10 years.
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Ducournau openly plays with themes of gender identity, sexuality, queerness, violence and unconditional love, barreling down the highway like David Cronenberg's "Crash" with its pedal to the metal.
“Titane” is determined to make David Cronenberg’s “Crash,” its biggest inspiration, look tame.
With its mix of extreme violence and auto-eroticism (so to speak), Titane will inevitably draw comparisons to David Cronenberg’s Crash.
It’s a daringly queer and undoubtedly controversial ride, resulting in a most uncommon monster movie — a cross between David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and the uterine horrors of Takashi Miike’s “Gozu,” perhaps — where the main character hardly ever speaks and what Ducournau is trying to say is wildly open to interpretation.
In J.G. Ballard’s seminal 1973 cult novel Crash, infamously adapted in 1996 by David Cronenberg, the author rationalizes the morbid predilections of a character collecting grisly curios as items which “formed the key to a new sexuality, born from perverse technology.”
Despite a prologue that links a young girl’s traumatic auto accident to sexual compulsion, however, it should be said up front that Titane is not ultimately concerned with fetishistic obsession — which means that it only superficially resembles David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996).
Cutting her hair and performing a radical act of impromptu auto-rhinoplasty, Alexia presents herself as a boy, then forms an increasingly perverse father-son bond with Vincent (Lindon), the troubled, body-pumping, steroid-shooting den daddy to a squadron of firefighters - whose all-male dance sessions suggest a flashier tribute to Claire Denis’s homoerotic images of the Foreign Legion in Beau Travail .
Nodding to Cronenberg and anime and Claire Denis (there’s “Beau Travail” in the many men-with-men dancing scenes, and there’s a little “High Life” fuckbox in the car-intercourse scenes) and “Holy Motors” and Nicolas Winding Refn (if he had the stones), “Titane” is bold in its reference points, no-holds-barred in its approach to some of the hottest-button issues of the day, and brash – and often very funny – in its deliciously grisly and inventive image-making.
Plus, a gaggle of bro-y firefighters let it all loose to some disco in the most rapturous dance scene since Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail.”
It may not be long before Titane is programmed as a double feature alongside Beau Travail.
However, I found myself just as much reminded of such early Cronenberg works as Rabid or The Brood.
Even Cronenberg's The Fly and Quentin Dupieux's films, Rubber, Mandibles and Keep an Eye Out, take their refreshing concepts in more interesting and surprisingly profound directions.
The hosts of Cronenbergian body horror are typically men—think James Woods in Videodrome , Jeff Goldblum in The Fly , Peter Weller in Naked Lunch —while Ducournau has seized the opportunity to explore women’s bodies, much as fellow Frenchwoman Marina de Van did in her little-seen (but superb) 2002 film In My Skin .
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However, I found myself just as much reminded of such early Cronenberg works as Rabid or The Brood.
Cut to: The present, when Alexia is a terse and severe thirtysomething car model embodied by newcomer Agathe Rousselle (in an unforgettable performance that often evokes a gender-fluid take on the murderous vulnerability Scarlett Johansson brought to “Under the Skin”).
While Crash is a starting point, Ducournau’s fresh take on body horror leads into Under the Skin (2013) territory, and frames the growing divinity of Rousselle as a face reminiscent of Falconetti’s anguish in Dreyer’s 1928 landmark The Passion of Joan of Arc (significantly in her final sequences with Lindon).
While Crash is a starting point, Ducournau’s fresh take on body horror leads into Under the Skin (2013) territory, and frames the growing divinity of Rousselle as a face reminiscent of Falconetti’s anguish in Dreyer’s 1928 landmark The Passion of Joan of Arc (significantly in her final sequences with Lindon).
Even Cronenberg's The Fly and Quentin Dupieux's films, Rubber, Mandibles and Keep an Eye Out, take their refreshing concepts in more interesting and surprisingly profound directions.
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Blending Cronenbergian Crash vibes with Bart Layton’s documentary The Imposter , Titane is intriguing—but unfortunately, it falls short when it comes to emotional engagement.
At that point, “Titane” enters the territory of John Guare and Fred Schepisi’s 1993 movie “Six Degrees of Separation,” wherein a young scammer introduces himself to a couple as their long lost son.