In an ideal world, this review would simply be the phrase: “Go see Titane, but remember to buckle your emotional seatbelts in advance.” This is a puddle that becomes a creek, then a river, and then before you know it you’re being pulled under in an amniotic sea of fucked-up choices, blood and motor oil.
The red-band trailer is recommended should you need a bit more encouragement, because it covers some of the tonal ground writer-director Julia Ducournau (Raw) is working with — neon bodies and sustained menace and a vibe that feels like an unholy collision between Grandrieux’s Sombre and the Goddess show from Verhoeven’s Showgirls, or maybe even what Corky St. Clair's legendary production of Backdraft was like. But even that only goes so far, which is as it should be. Titane is such a pleasure in the weird path it takes, shifting genres and changing the emotional lighting with every cut.
It’s quite possible, even, that this entire film is meant as a stylistic metabolization of childhood trauma, or an experiment to see what happens when one makes an inverse slow burn. Alexia (Agathe Rousselle, in a staggering performance of few words and commanding physicality, whether dancing with cars or made up to look like Peter Bark) wears the memory of a car accident when she was a little girl in the form of the titanium plate in the side of her head. It hasn’t stopped her from chasing her dreams, and it may very well have helped along the way, because Alexia is very good at all of her various pursuits, whether that’s finding her inner Tawny Kitaen or her inner Catherine Tramell.
There’s been some talk of this film in the same breath as David Cronenberg’s masterpiece Crash, which is fair — both are rigorous and extreme films that made a sensation at Cannes, and that you might feel skittish about taking your dad to see. The Cronenberg film is very rooted in late-20th-century society as envisioned by J.G. Ballard, and what Ducournau has given us here is a film that feels very of the moment, or of the not-too-distant future, depicting a life and a mind that have developed parallel to the internet, bouncing around in the subject’s skull until being released into the world in bursts of Dionysian frenzy and consuming blazes.
Ducournau has a gift for metabolizing concepts and modes of storytelling that have proliferated for decades; but at no point does it feel like she’s doing a referencefest or using genre touchstones, and this feels like a giant leap forward from 2016's Raw, which impressed but left me at a distance. This film gets in close and doesn’t let go. The fact that it won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is both historic (Ducournau is the first female filmmaker to win that award since Jane Campion did for The Piano in 1993) and deeply exciting; there’s not really anything quite like this movie.
There’s something very liberating about Titane. In its own way, it’s telling a story that any audience member could relate to, even if they weren’t necessarily into its more extreme touches (e.g., heaps of nudity, Liquid Sky head spikes, shocking furniture choices). If so inclined, you could break this film down to the denominator of damaged people learning how to love again, and also to not murder. But that’s a kind of film that does not carry this sort of body count, or this kind of emotional impact. This is a moving, gross, occasionally very funny and sometimes transcendent work that balances its Olivier Olivier family psychology and its Superman III body horror in a way that is completely enthralling and never predictable or boring. I felt it in my heart and in the metal plate in my neck.
