TITANE

Directing: C
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

The one question running through my mind through the entirety of Titane was: why? I’ve had some time to think about it, and I have yet to come up with an answer to that question.

It’s certainly not boring, I’ll give it that much. It’s about all I’m willing to give it. Well, except that the acting is adequate, I suppose. The editing is slightly better. The director is a woman, at least; that’s something I am always prone to support. Julia Ducournau’s previous feature film effort as both writer and director, Raw (2016), was a film I did enjoy. It had a cleverly bent premise, in which a vegetarian gets a taste for blood and then becomes a murderous cannibal. Judging by Titane, “body horror” as a genre is apparently Ducanau’s thing.

With Titane, however, I struggle to find a point or a purpose, other than that genre for the sake of itself. I mean, I can just imagine the intellectuals finding all the “deeper meaning” in this film that supposedly flew over my head, but I have officially lost my patience. If I can’t easily find an answer to why this particular story is being told to me, I am just left annoyed.

How much can I tell about this movie without spoiling it? How many of you will watch it anyway? This is a relatively obscure French film, albeit one with apparently the “biggest US debut by a Palme d’Or winner in 17 years.” That is evidently a pretty low bar, though. The movie has made about half a million dollars. I’m still left wondering how much it matters.

I’ll tell you this: the first half of the movie features an exotic dancer, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) straight up murdering people, often with the metal stick she uses to keep her hair up. She is quickly identified as a wanted suspect, literally referred to as a serial killer. Many of these murders are rather graphic. In the second half of the film, she disguises herself as the long missing son of a firefighter (Vincent Lindon), and develops a familial bond with him, although there are moments that are borderline incestuous. From his perspective, anyway.

Through all of this, Alexia experience a rapidly developing pregnancy from . . . a car. I mean, fuck it, I’ll spoil it: Alexia fucks a car. We basically already saw Cameron Diaz fuck a car in The Counselor (2013), but this movie ups the ante with a subsequent pregnancy—with what appears to be motor oil as the amniotic fluid.

Julie Ducaournau effectively, one might even say amazingly, makes the pregnancy the “B plot,” as Vincent deludes himself into believing Alexia really is his son, while the young firefighters who work under him plainly see that Alexia is not who she’s pretending to be. She spends a lot of time binding her breasts, and over time even her expanding belly, and it gets into vaguely uncomfortable territory when it comes to movies featuring characters crossdressing for nefarious reasons.

Such considerations are vasty overshadowed, of course, by the wild shit happening in the movie otherwise. What the hell is this baby going to look like? Alexia has a titanium plate in her head, the result of a terrible car accident she could easily be blamed for as a young girl, irritating her dad from the backseat in the opening sequence of the film. Even as a little girl Alexia is definitively creepy, a little shit, and when she leaves the hospital after her surgery we see her kiss and hug the car. Cut to her dancing in a club amongst exotic dancers who gyrate against and on cars inside a giant warehouse. I suppose we’re meant to understand Alexia has a lifelong car fetish, although Titane doesn’t ever make that idea particularly explicit. Except when she’s somehow literally impregnated by one, I suppose. I’m pretty sure we even see the car reach sexual climax, which was new.

The effect of the titanium plate is never given true clarity, either. Is that what makes her psychotic? And why does she pause and actually find herself caring for an unwilling to slaughter Vincent? I really don’t understand any of it. We do eventually find out what her baby looks like, which winds up somehow being simultaneously bizarre and somewhat disappointing.

it would sure be interesting to be privy to some psychoanalysis of Julie Ducournau. I suspect it would be more satisfying than watching this movie was. Raw at least succeeded in the evident purpose of grossing us out. All I really got out of Titane was an hour and forty-five minutes of thinking, What the fuck? We never see Alexia bleed, although we regularly see her leaking motor oil, out of tears in the skin of her belly revealing more shiny metal underneath, or even leaking out of her nipples. Her body goes through a lot of abuses, much of it self-inflicted in her attempt to make herself look like Vincent’s missing son. I had to turn away from the screen a lot.

I was just relieved when I could turn away one last time and leave the building.

Apparently they don’t make automotive condoms.

Overall: C