![]() ![]() With punk rock aggressiveness, she forces her way through the crowd and ends up gyrating on the hood of car. Saved by a titanium implant in her head, we next see Alexia as a young adult (phenomenally played by Agathe Rouselle), in a scene highly reminiscent of the opening single shot from Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale, strutting toward her job as a dancer at an Auto Show. Annoyed, he turns to scold her, swerving off the road and injuring his daughter. ![]() With enough brutal violence to fill all of the Halloween sequels combined, this viscerally charged film will likely polarize audiences, but its vision and power cannot be denied.Ī highly visual, almost wordless film, Titane begins with Alexia, a young, androgynous girl, pestering her father by kicking the back of his driver's seat. The 2021 Cannes Palme d'Or winner, Titane, writer/director Julia Ducournau's sophomore effort, definitely veers towards the latter type of confrontation. Titane will appeal to fans of David Cronenberg's body horror and the French noveau horror scene, but I found its exploitation excess to be short-lived, and the creativity on display felt more stuck in neutral than as advertised.Ĭrash! Boom! Bang! - Film Review: Titane ★★★★1/2įor me, good art is pretty, but great art is confrontational, forcing the viewer to reflect upon the human condition and reveal truths, however inspiring or ugly. ![]() It seems quite strange for me to say that a movie about a woman impregnated by a car isn't strange enough, and yet there it is. The car fetish is never quite explained, which is fine, but once she's impregnated, the movie becomes more of a standard drama about hiding her burgeoning pregnant belly to keep her cover. Titane feels like Docournau was combining different stray story elements from half-finished scripts and trying to, through sheer force of will, cram them together. To say the second half of the movie is a creative letdown is an understatement. From there she goes on the run, poses as a man's missing adult son, and the movie becomes entirely about hiding her real identity, whether this grieving father fully suspects or even cares, and learning the ropes of fire department protocol. We watch her kill her friend, on a whim, and then her roommate walks downstairs, a witness needing killing, and then another and another, and this for me was the darkly comic high-point of the film. The first half hour involves the car copulation and then becomes a slasher movie, as it's revealed our heroine has been killing locals for months. ![]() A NEON release.What's the point of a weird, gonzo movie when it stops being weird? That's my takeaway from French director Julia Docournau's (Raw) Palme D'Or winning oddity, a movie that has been nicknamed, "That film where the lady gets impregnated by a car." That does inexplicably happen, and I was waiting for more bizarre interludes, but then Titane becomes a completely different movie. A feverish, violent, and frequently jaw-dropping ride, Titane nevertheless exposes the beating, fragile heart at its center as it questions our assumptions about gender, family, and love itself. However, once Alexia goes into hiding from the police, and is taken in by a grief-stricken firefighter (Vincent Lindon), Ducournau reveals her deployment of genre tropes to be as fluid and destabilizing as her mercurial main character. Moving with the logic of a dream-and often the force of a nightmare-the film begins as a kind of horror movie, with a series of shocking events perpetrated by Alexia (Agathe Rouselle, in a dynamic and daring breakthrough), a dancer with a titanium plate in her skull following a childhood car accident. The winner of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or, Titane is a thrillingly confident vision from Julia Ducournau that deposits the viewer directly into its director’s headspace. Q&A with Julia Ducournau, Agathe Rousselle, and Vincent Lindon on Sept. ![]()
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