Titane movie review: All you need is love in Julia Ducournau’s controversial Cannes award-winning car-sex movie

Titane is about a serial killer who gets pregnant from having sex with a car. It is the second feature film by French writer-director Julia Ducournau, whom I find to be an incredibly sensitive filmmaker. Titane won the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where the audience was reportedly shocked and repulsed. The same had happened with her earlier film Raw (2016). Scrape off the weirdness, and you will find her films to be warm and tender stories of individuals figuring themselves out.

Underneath the sensationalist trappings of body horror, Ducournau’s coming-of-age films feature heroines grappling with their evolving desires and changing bodies. Her short film Junior (2011) has a young girl shedding skin like a snake. That’s Ducournau’s metaphor for puberty. Her debut feature Raw might seem to be about the young heroine’s growing taste for human flesh. But it is actually about her emerging sexuality. Titane, finally out in India on Mubi, is no different.

Alexia is fascinated with cars from a young age. After the young Alexia (Adèle Guigue) injures her head in a car accident, the doctors fit a titanium plate into her head. (Titane is French for titanium). During the surgery, Alexia, who had earlier appeared quite jolly in the car before it crashed, now looks cold and inexpressive –foreshadowing the emotional detachment that will define her as an adult. After the surgery, the first thing she does on leaving the hospital is hug her car and kiss it. Buckle up, we are entering Ducournau country.

The adult Alexia, played by 33-year-old model and first-time actor Agathe Rouselle, is a showgirl. Ducournao introduces her as gyrating around and rubbing herself against a muscle car. The seductive dance ends with her mock-humping the car while she looks into the camera. Minutes later, we get a glimpse of her homicidal side.

The critical scene of this movie is, of course, the one where the car impregnates her. If this scene went wrong, the film wouldn’t work. How Ducournau films this moment is incredible. I won’t reveal the specifics, but the scene is scored to choral music and bathed in the glow of the to-be-daddy car’s headlights. A spent Alexia is later framed from within the sunroof, ominously surrounded by the flames of the car’s design. By giving this moment a religious dimension, Ducournau suggests that what has just happened was a divine miracle.

Alexia is soon a fugitive on the run, pregnant with a motorspawn. She lands up at the house of the grizzled fire captain Vincent (Vincent Lindon), pretending to be his long-lost son Adrien. While Vincent’s young, male deputies are not sure what to make of the androgynous and strangely silent fake-Adrien, Vincent is crying happy tears, eager to play a father’s role again.

Alexia is shown to be emotionally withdrawn from everyone, including her actual parents. Why that is, the film never tells us. I suppose it’s the PTSD caused by the accident. When Alexia feels uncomfortable engaging with someone, she resorts to violence. Vincent, meanwhile, is lonely. After his son disappeared, his wife left him. He ploughs through life trying to be a strong paternal figure to his group of young firemen. Alexia has never experienced love. Vincent wants to love again. Titane gives them some touching moments and a fitting climax which shares the same conceit as the car-sex scene.

Titane has drawn comparisons to body horror master David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash, which is also about people sexually aroused by cars. But other than the matter of mechanophilia, Crash and Titane are extremely different.

Cronenberg’s interest lies in the human condition in relation to their bodies and technology. Crash feels like a dispassionate study of a particular psychopathology, with Cronenberg observing his characters in a petri dish. Ducournau is an entirely different kind of filmmaker. Born to a gynaecologist and a dermatologist, Ducournau fuses her interest in the human body with what I think are love stories. Her work is better categorised as dark fantasy rather than body horror.

Her films have also been considered as an example of feminist reclamation of the New French Extremity style, which I think is a correct view. Ducournau’s works do not share the nihilism of those borderline pornographic and exploitative turn-of-the-century French films, such as Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible or Alexandre Aja’s High Tension. Alongside the rise of ‘torture porn’ (Saw and Hostel series) in the United States, they had become trendy some 20 years back.

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These films went out of fashion by the mid-2010s, until the likes of Ducournau and Coralie Fargeat (director of 2017 French thriller Revenge) armed their New-New-French-Extreme heroines with agency, vulnerability and three-dimensional personality and revived the subgenre. A woman’s body, blood and guts are still key to these films, but they are no longer props or objects of spectacle. They are the active agents and central concerns now.

Titane
Director: Julia Ducournau
Cast: Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rouselle