Mark Reviews Movies: TITANE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 30, 2021

Writer/director Julia Ducournau has assembled a collection of bizarre ideas with Titane, which begins with a car accident and sets its plot in motion with a woman somehow having sex with a car. Aside from whatever might be growing inside the woman's abdomen for most of the movie, little of that actually matters for the rest of the story, which attempts to be about two lonely, desperate people, making an unlikely connection in spite of and because of their pasts.

That notion is the closest Ducournau comes to giving this odd tale a thematic through line, which feels even more vital to material as disconnected from reality—and, often, unconnected from itself—as this. The story flows from one concept to the next, with Ducournau demanding that we follow the disjointed ideas, plot points, emotional developments, and fantastical and/or horrific sights—without the filmmaker really grounding any of it or even making it seem like a cohesive whole.

The story begins with a bothersome young girl, annoying her father as he drives. The result is an accident that necessitates the girl having a titanium plate in her skull. She doesn't hold the consequences against the car, at least, if the girl's caressing, embracing, and kissing the vehicle after being released from the hospital is any indication.

Many years later, the girl is now a woman, named Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), who's a professional dancer at various trade shows. She's a bit of a celebrity in these circles, on account of her rather provocative moves and the passion with which she grinds on and licks a car during her introductory scene.

A fan of Alexia's follows her to her own car, looking for an autograph and pronounce his love for her. She responds by stabbing him in the ear with a metallic hair stick. It's not the first time she has done this, based on news reports of a serial killer in the area and a dementedly comical massacre later.

Cleaning herself after the killing, Alexia discovers a car, its headlights shining at the locker room as if in anticipating, awaiting her. She gets in the backseat (as she was during the accident, if that means anything—although there's no sign of that, if it does). The car starts comically bouncing higher and faster, while Alexia sits naked and moaning. Somehow, she ends up pregnant from the encounter.

The strangest thing about Ducournau's approach, perhaps, is how something so patently absurd is treated in such a straightforward and sincere manner—indeed, how an entire story that begins with such a ridiculous conceit seems to possess no awareness of just how ludicrous all of it is. This isn't necessarily a critique, as the movie's more effective moments are the ones that embrace both the absurdity and the emotional underpinnings of this story. There is an intriguing dichotomy here in how the filmmaker finds humor in the early darkness (a traumatic experience in one backseat leading to a gag in another and that aforementioned murder spree, in which witnesses keep showing up, like in some French door farce, to Alexia's sighing annoyance), only to treat its main narrative with earnestness.

It's not as if the central storyline is any less silly on the surface. It involves Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a firefighter whose son disappeared 10 years ago. On the run from a police search for her, Alexia disguises herself as the missing son—taping down her breasts and her increasingly distended belly, as well as breaking her own nose. Vincent accepts Alexia as his son Adrien, either because he actually believes the ruse or because he desperately wants to do so.

These two characters share some things, or at least that's what we have to assume. After all, Alexia is such an intentional mystery of a character (She has her trauma, a rough relationship with her parents, and murders people for inexplicable reasons), a vessel for the story's oddest gimmick, and a mostly silent participant in Vincent's acceptance/delusion.

Vincent's grief-stricken longing for his son—or, as it might actually be, a son of any kind—is understandable, sympathetic, and portrayed with a deep sense of melancholy by Lindon. Rousselle's performance, which is primarily in her physicality and face, is also noteworthy here, especially in the way Alexia's transformation into Adrien evolves from self-preservation, to escaping from whatever is happening inside her body, and to fulfilling Vincent's previously lost hope.

This bond, as contrived and unlikely and separate from the story's initial ideas as it may be, possesses some sad glow of truth in it. Whatever emotional reality might exist within this strange relationship, though, is constantly undermined by our awareness of Alexia's actions, as well as Ducournau's insistent evasion of actually confronting those actions or developing that character beyond the charade. That's not even mentioning the metaphorical time bomb of the uncertain metaphor of whatever is growing inside Alexia's body.

Ducournau surely deserves some respect for making something as peculiar as Titane and finding some degree of authenticity within it. It's not enough to compensate for what the movie lacks: a consistency of ideas, story, and purpose.

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