‘Titane’: The New Flesh Is Thriving, Living Rent-Free in Julia Ducournau’s F*cked Up Metallica Brain [Cannes Review]

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having. “Titane,” Ducournau’s follow-up to her sensational debut “Raw,” is roughly seven horror movies plus one bizarrely tender parent-child romance soldered into one machine and painted all over with flames: it’s so replete with startling ideas, suggestive ellipses, transgressive reversals and preposterous propositions that it ought to be a godforsaken mess. But while God has almost certainly forsaken this movie, He wouldn’t have been much needed around it anyway. Ducournau’s filmmaking is as pure as her themes are profane: to add insult to the very many injuries inflicted throughout, “Titane” is gorgeous to look at, to listen to, to obsess over, and fetishize. 

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Gorgeous, but not at all pretty except, perhaps for the pink, hairless seashell of a scar that spirals over little Alexia’s right ear, a permanent reminder of the metal plate grafted onto her skull after the car crash that opens the film. Most kids would be wary of cars after that, but not Alexia, who, on leaving the hospital, runs to the family vehicle to stroke and kiss it, under the ice-water stare of her distant, distrustful father, played at zero degrees Kelvin by Bertrand Bonello. A couple of decades later, Alexia, now unforgettably embodied in all her different bodies by stunning, scowling, model-actor Agathe Rousselle, has found some low-level fame in the only possible career that could appeal to her uniquely weird fixations: clad in neon fishnets and punky metallic bandeau, she dances to titillate horned-up men at car shows. Ducournau and co-conspirator DP Ruben Impens lean hard into the prurience offered by such a venue, following Alexia on a long snaking route through the floor show, where other girls shimmy and spasm orgasmically against the shiny fenders of muscle cars until she reaches her chosen beau: an enormous Cadillac with a ferocious shiny grille, atop which Alexia writhes and jiggles and twerks through an entire routine. 

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In the communal shower later, Justine (“Raw“‘ star Garance Marillier) tries to chat her up, an attempt stymied when Alexia accidentally gets her hair caught in Justine’s nipple piercing – the film is deadly serious about biology, technology, and body modification of all conceivable types, but it is also hilariously alive to the absurd possibilities that bodies offer for clumsiness, collision and, to the budding psychopath, curiosity about the pain limits of others. Later, a stalkery guy approaches Alexia and keeps on pushing his luck until it runs out, and she abruptly stabs him through the ear with the handy metal rod she uses as a hair stick. En route to becoming a one-woman Manson Family, Alexia will dispatch victims by other means, too, like strangulation and arson and barstool battery, but the dull metal spike is her weapon of choice. 

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Later still, that same night, she copulates with the Cadillac. 

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Unlike the auto-eroticism of Cronenberg‘s “Crash,” the movie’s most obvious influence, here sex with cars is a fertile event, and despite her best efforts at self-aborting (cue an excruciating new use for that little metal rod and a lot of motor oil spilling out like black blood) Alexia becomes, and remains, pregnant. Till now the film has been peculiar – in the reptilian sympathy it evokes for its serial killing antiheroine, in its ritualistic detailing (the chanting male choirs of Jim Williams’ score lend a creepy hand there) in its splattery violence and, oh yeah, in how a car and a woman make a baby. But the peculiarity engine has barely even been idling; it only really roars to life when Alexia bungles a murder and must go on the run, choosing to hide by painfully taping down her breasts and belly, shaving off her eyebrows, smashing her nose flat against a washbasin, and passing herself off as Adrien, a boy who disappeared over a decade before.

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It doesn’t matter that she’s not altogether convincing. Adrien’s father, Vincent (an absolutely irreplaceable Vincent Lindon, completely subverting his decent, blue-collar everyman persona), wants so much to believe his son is still alive that he basically imprints on Alexia as Adrien and brings her home to live with him. Vincent is a fire chief, in charge of a fireman’s calendar-worth of buff young men, and perhaps it’s so as not to lose face with these guys (who are hypermasc in a deeply homoerotic way, forever dancing in slomo stripped to the waist bathed in the recently identified phenomenon of “bisexual lighting,”) that Vincent regularly injects his waxy, bruised old derriere with steroids. For a brief time afterward, he’s the ruddy, glistening vein-popping Hulk version of the struggling, gray-faced Papa Bear he is otherwise. 

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So a female dancer whose physical desirability to men is her livelihood is pregnant with a Cadillac’s baby while disguised as an unstable firefighter’s long-lost son. I’m not sure Dom Toretto had this in mind when he screamed “faaaaamilyyyyy!” as he drove his car across the rings of Saturn or whatever in “Fast and Furious 9.” Clearly, I have not seen “Fast and Furious 9,” and the comparison might seem silly. But “Titane” is a visually striking, thrillingly perverse corrective to the lunkish sexless heteronormativity of that petrolhead franchise while also truly, troublingly interrogating the notion of family as a thing you are born into vs. a thing you choose.

LGBTQIA is already an unwieldy acronym. But it’s a good thing there are still some letters of the alphabet left; we’ll need them if we’re to parse all the sexualities and gender identities that “Titane” deals in. 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. But underneath the broad strokes and the bit where Vincent uses the Macarena as a teaching aid for CPR, there is deft, detailed filmmaking at work too. A living-room dance turns into a fight and back again with every motion edged in menace. A scarcely glimpsed figure in a firefight casts doubt on a decades-long tale of grief. And the faintest ghost of an incipient mustache growing in on an upper lip contains a multitude of knotty, transformative implications about gender and physiology and new flesh living anew. “Titane” is coming, and it’s coming to fuck you up. [A-]

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