When Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) was a little girl, she irritated her father so much while he was driving that he crashed the car, sending her flying as she had unfastened her seatbelt and cracking open her skull. A major brain operation followed to save her life, and she ended up with a large titanium plate in her head to ensure she would be safe. But now she is an adult, the plate seems to have informed her choices in life in that she is perhaps overkeen on cars, and has taken a job where she dances on them at motor shows, adding glamour along with her fellow models and picking up fans in the process...
But Alexia is not interested in having fans, indeed at the beginning she is not interested in any male affection at all, not from her father (for whom a permanent migraine appears to have been her gift to him) and certainly not from her creepy, overbearing superfans. Therefore, writer and director Julia Ducournau's Titane could be viewed as a conventional story of a young woman who has her troubles learning to accept love and it making her a better person. In many other directors' hands, that is precisely what it would have been, but these were the hands of the artiste who gave the world the cannibal horror Raw.
Eyebrows were raised when this won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and Ducournau won best director, with reactions ranging from "well done for choosing a champion that truly took chances!" to "they're being provocative for the sake of it by awarding this trash!" Comparisons to the oeuvre of David Cronenberg were inevitable given the body horror stylings on display, but this was no Crash copy, actually while Alexia does have sex with a car, it was more the pregnancy that resulted that was the important element, not the act of sex itself, as it was in the Cronenberg cult effort; this was a very female spin on so-called "auto-eroticism".
In a plot that not so much meandered as whimsically followed whatever thought popped into his head, Alexia turns serial killer and starts to go to ridiculous lengths to try and escape justice for her crimes, verging on pitch black comedy in places. The scene where she dispatched a house full of residents a case in point, it was so daft that you either went with it since it was so violent that it forced you to take it seriously, or the opposite was true and you rejected it outright. Yet at its heart there was an endorsement of nurturing, again a female trait that not many horror movies would think to include in their themes.
As we saw in the second half when our anti-heroine hit on the idea of posing as a missing teenage boy to stay undercover. Enter the top-billed Vincent Lindon as, er, Vincent, who takes Alexia under his wing as he needs to believe she is Adrien, his missing son. Despite all evidence to the contrary, and the evidence of his eyes for that matter, it was clear this was a woman in her early thirties and not a young boy, and to make things worse, she is having to bind her bosom and growing baby bump to get away with her subterfuge (she has also broken her nose to further conceal her identity). She definitely doesn't look like the glamourpuss we saw at the beginning, but then neither does her new identity convince either.
But that didn't matter: what did was firefighter Vincent finally getting his son back, someone for him to love because that was missing in his life for ten years, and Alexia, who has never felt the need to love and has even tried to abort her car baby on the toilet, has a chance to reform. You could see Titane as a gender-bending assault on all your assumptions about sexuality, yet you could also see it as a reactionary "leopard can't change its spots" yarn which tells you that you can't deny Mother Nature. Why it could be both was down to the piece's vagueness, wild enough to be all things to all people when the setpieces and weirdness were so vivid, specific in its extremities and confused in its gender politics. What was clear that the real power here was not in sexuality, it was in the care a parent can take over their child, and facing up to that may not be easy for everyone. Especially not murderous car fetishists. Rather excellent music by Jim Williams.
