Titane: Violent, tender, compelling

In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

As the end credits of Titane rolled out, after 108 minutes of unrelenting audio-visual provocation, I gently uncurled my tight fists and wiped my eyes of their dampness. I stepped out under the starlit sky and wished for serenity for the soul of Alexia, the broken and damaged protagonist of this incredibly violent but exceptionally tender film.

Director Julia Ducournau is two films old but is already established as a provocateur, with her storytelling as rife with allegory and symbols as it is with stark body horrors. It is an absolute triumph of technique and intent that she is able to break hearts even as her heroes graphically break bones on the screen.

Titane is about Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a girl who gets into a car accident, prompted by her father's irritation with her, which engenders the insertion of a metal plate in her head.

Alexia grows up to become a stripper who dances in motor shows which feature sexy slingy muscle cars. But she is touchy to attention, and fatal when someone crosses the line. Her hairpin is her lethal weapon of primary choice. And she has something going on for cars.  In the film's most notorious scene, amongst many, she makes love to a Cadillac - and gets impregnated to boot. But much deeper is her unexplained angst. Any slight she faces becomes a provocation to murder. Her mysterious killing spree takes a turn when a potential victim flees, and she has to run, hide and then reinvent herself. Her choice of disguise is as a long-lost son of a fire chief Vincent (Vincent Lindon), who himself is grieving and seems to be full of guilt for the loss of a child. The two then begin a cohabitation which becomes a fractured journey of two souls, who have been injured beyond redemption but find mysterious meaning in each other.

The film, on a straightforward plane, is a body horror thriller. But on a deeply symbolic level works on the insidious tribulations of a tortured life. Alexia has a father who is potentially an abuser. What happens to her with a car could well be the agency of a father gone perverse. And Vincent is a gruff man with a heart grieving for a lost son. He adopts her with no questions, seeking redemption and a place for his soul to rest in peace. Alexia's overflowing anger meets the crater of Vincent's ache to give love. What ensues is both redemptive and heart-breaking.

Julia Ducournau is a filmmaker with an incredible flair to shock. Her sensibilities, though brimming with the ambition to let nothing go unseen, are also capable of capturing a grieving soul. There is a visceral hint to the violence which punctures the audience’s nerves. I had to turn away from the screen, time and again, to avoid seeing the disturbing images, only to be confounded by the sound which was equally virulent and searing.

But to crack that hardness of visual assault and find infinite tenderness inside it, is this film’s special gift. The directorial craft which enables this makes Titane transcend genres - to literally start from a body/horror/thriller but to end as a tale of infinite loneliness and discovery.

The film would have been lesser without the naked vulnerability and rage of Agathe Rousselle. Her Alexia bares herself in every possible connotation of the word. Her immersion into the convoluted soul of Alexia is triumphant for its sheer bravery - more than the function of completely shedding her clothes is her ability to discover shards which hurt and bruise her as she completely inhabits her character.

The film brims over with technique. Julia Ducournau choreographs three dances with different intents - one with a provocative male gaze at a car show; another as a gentle entry into the growing affection of father and son, even as it progressively brims over with suspicion; and the last as a revelation of truths, a boy gyrating as a girl. There is style with a message.

The city in the film is drenched in a kaleidoscope of colours which mesh into each other engulfing the viewer in blues, reds, and yellows. And the incredible sound design is crisp and crackling - upping the ante in each squelch, scratch, crack, and cry.  The music jumps like flames to engulf the film’s sensibilities, and the songs used - from She’s not there by The Zombies to Lighthouse by Future Islands - play as skein to the film’s structure, garish, loud, underlining every emotion being emoted on the screen.

The aural and visual experience is overwhelming.

The film is a difficult watch. Alexia's capacity for self-harm, to preserve what she thinks is worth preserving, is a choice she executes with unrelenting and unthinking alacrity. The violence is mind-numbingly graphic: when she appears, you know there are going to be heads pierced, eyes gouged or mouths destroyed.

But the bigger issues which the film deals with relating to acceptability - our own by ourselves, the lies we tell ourselves, the artificial means we use to aggrandize what is slipping away. But in the sadness of what we are unable to accept or what we make ourselves accept, lies a strange ironic acceptability. In the midpoint of the lies we believe and the truths we reject, lies a sweet spot called innocence. When two lost souls meet there, the possibility of survival mysteriously emerges.

Titane, amidst its rage and blood, and sometimes because of it, is possibly one of the tenderest films on love you are likely to ever see.

Trivia

• Julia Ducournau takes inspiration from filmmakers like David Cronenberg and David Lynch, and authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley. Their fascination with monstrosities also obsesses Julia’s canvas.
• Titane won the prestigious Palme d'Or award at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. The funny story is that the award was presented accidentally  to Ducournau right at the beginning of the awards ceremony by jury president Spike Lee, though it was meant to be given right at the end of the evening!
• Though both films by Julia Ducournau have cars as important plot points, the irony is that she doesn’t even have a driver's licence!

Watch Titane here. 

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)