Gotta love the dddrrrrama Viggo Mortensen created because he thinks his bestie Cronenberg made better car fucking movie. Meanwhile Cronenberg doesnt like when film makers compete like this, and apparently liked Titane. And I feel this is how things should be on film festivals, drama about fucked up kinky movies. Delightful. Hopefully it will make more people watch BOTH Crash (1996) and Titane. 

Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)

Watch the first trailer.

Titanebegins not with a whimper but a cacophony: a deafening engine rev; the crash as car meets concrete; then the image of a girl in a horrific head-brace, like something from a Saw film, as she gets fitted with a titanium plate. Next a temporal leap to a car show, erotic dancers, pulsating synth music, chrome, and neon. The girl from the crash appears from the milieu, now a serial killer and sex worker. After the show, a stalker follows her to her car and gets a needle the size of a chopstick lodged in his eardrum. His mouth sputters like a piece of faulty machinery. Scarcely 10 minutes have passed.

Julia Ducournau, a Parisian whose debut Raw became the breakout success of the Critics’ Week sidebar at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, returns to the South of France last week in Competition—a sharp ascendency—and it has been nothing short of sensational. An experience as invigorating as a pair of jumper cables, it premiered halfway through the second week as late-fest fatigue was descending on the Croissette and seemed to almost singlehandedly wake the festival back up—enough at least to capture the eyes and imagination of Spike Lee’s Jury who have awarded it the Palme d’Or; a truly shocking, punky choice that made Ducournau only the second woman in history to collect that award.

Continue reading our Cannes review of Titane.

Titane (2021)

Titane (2021) vs the Power of the Dog (2021)

I was lukewarm on the Power of the Dog, mostly because I felt it was under-packed and a little tedious as a result. I like Kirsten Dunst when she’s cheery (and I have a special place in my heart for her when she has a southern accent) but I generally don’t like her when she plays world-weary plus one or two entries in the DSM-5. Jesse Plemmons is wasted and Benedict Cumberbatch is absolutely fine but not exactly stretching. For a period drama with cinematography a drunk marmoset couldn’t screw up (American west vistas!) with an unnecessary TV level twist ending, I guess it reeked of quality, at least. I’ve never been a particular Jane Campion fan, but I liked Top of the Lake and I guess I’m just glad I have her around in general as a public figure (Katheryn Bigelow>Jane Campion, fight me!).

Titane, on the other hand, really kicked me in the gut. I wasn’t sure this was gonna be the case out of the gate as I found the first act of the movie offputting, mainly because I think it was trying to implicate the viewer in the luridness, undercurrent be damned, but the movie changes so rapidly so many times that my feelings on the opening are buried under layers and layers of additional recontextualization. Incidentally, it was the second movie I’ve seen in the month where the heroine has the exact same backstory: as a kid in the car, her kicking the back of her dad’s seat leads to him turning around, taking his eyes off the road, leading to an accident leading to trauma leading to psychological scars, though in this case there is a physical cerebriform scar as well (the other film was the perfectly fine horror thriller No Exit).

So these elicited pretty different reactions from me - edge of my seat borderline discomfort/brain on fire total engagement versus try not to nod off. One is a languid drama of washed out earth tones and the other is semiotically loaded hyper-now fusillade of body horror with the color palate of a neon punk album cover. But these two films that couldn’t be more different are surprise entrants in the “secretly the same movie” sweepstakes, maybe the most unusual one since Age of Ultron remade Eraserhead.

In both films, the world is hostile to the feminine, but requires “women’s work” which brings characters with feminine traits into uncomfortable juxtaposition with antagonistic, destructive masculinity. Within this there is an all male club with a head bully, a performatively hypermasculine figure, who sees something mirrored in the main othered-from-maleness character because there is an insecurity born of a failure of their masculine self image that they are overcompensating for. They see in the dependent character a potential for/fantasy of a world of unification where they can be whole as a man, bonded to this boy. They develop a relationship ambivalent from the dependent’s side, because they need protection to navigate in a brotherhood hostile to their identity; however they do get something out of the bond (including learning proficiencies that they are initially quite bad at) but the ultimate goal is to get past this, transform into the next stage, and protect motherhood while the bully sees a permanent “father” bond that has a dimension of sexual potential. This above culminates in/is ratified by a death by bodily degradation.


As you know, I think all movies are about the creative act of making movies on some level. These films are both from the perspective of a female filmmaker, but diverge quite drastically in what they are ultimately saying about trying to make art in a male-dominated field. Titane was a lot more cynical, and showed a greater deal of self-loathing, and the fact that it is body horror by a female Director should let you imagine a lot of what was going on the meta. But comparing rhyming works from the only two female directors to have won the Palme d’Or makes a kind of sense.

Jane Campion is an Anglophile Director and center boomer, while Julia Ducournau is French and is an early millennial. Jane Campion has lost a child, has an adult daughter, and had to deal with Harvey Weinstein personally. There is a kind of masculinity that she abhors but is interested in deconstructing and possibly using for parts. Julia Ducournau is right at the end of her childbearing years, does not have children that I can find evidence of and has seen more recent phase of commodification of female art, one of the identity being used as a selling point in uncomfortable commercial tension with self expression, which might be easier to swallow if the appearance of increased control were more than an illusion.


Campion has been there, done that, and ultimately sketches a fantasy of getting the better of the system, and succeeding as yourself once you’ve been through the necessary difficult process of negotiating your agency with the world. It’s not fair, but you can ultimately win. Why she chooses to identify with a gay male character is another discussion (could just be other reasons why she wanted to tell that story) however it does work archetypally when you take into account mother character as an aspect of the same psychology as the son. It is an older successful person’s story.


Ducournau’s concerns are more primal and the archetypal stuff is right there on the surface (for chrissake the movie is named to evoke mythological Titans, and the Gaia/Uranus symbolism is all over the car-sex scenes). But bringing the work of art into the world requires you to deal with groups of men who don’t see you as a full person, and the process involves auto-misogyny, abiding the hostility, symbolic death, and losing your “offspring” to that world. That plus the transcendence of the organic and that this mechanical thing is what you have in lieu of having produced a child, that your body is constantly reminding you is some kind of imperative. This is a movie made by a woman entering middle age dealing with emerging failures of the body, an urge to create before it is too late, and still being at an age/in a culture where your identity is entirely bound up in sexual utility.

One are my favorite things about the movie is the way the idea of being a fireman is treated. Ducournau has said her seminal movie is the Elephant Man and she has a specific interest in the monstrous within the creative capacity and I think she taps into Lynchian use of fire as a primordial symbol of creation. It is notable how the degree to which ideas of firemen as both hyper masculine and homoerotic rubs against the use of fire as a symbol (she fucks a Cadillac lowrider with flames on the side and in a mirror scene fucks a firetruck, the fire is shown in a combustion engine, she burns down her parents house as a act of ridding herself of her old life then joins the world of the extinguishers). Other Lynchian and symbols include burnt motor oil, and there’s lots of Cronenbergian/Ridley Scott’s Alien movie effluvia including the fact that people spew seminal appearing fluid from their mouths when they are killed. The main difference between her and David Lynch is if you brought up Lacan to him, he wouldn’t know what the heck you were talking about, but if you said something about Baudrillard to Ducournau, she would correct you that Walter Benjamin is the correct point of reference.

Perhaps the basic difference in the way the characters relate in these two films boils down to Campion being of an age that a female attempting to do something seen as masculine might identify with the male, and split the feminine off into a sub function, while Ducournau is of an age (and maybe a culture) in which this gender conflict is trapped within a single character, the valences of this violence all roiling inside.

Titane

2021, Julia Ducournau