Titane is a hard film to discuss. Director Julia Ducornau frames the film and its set pieces such that they are as shocking on your third viewing as your first, but it is so much more effective if you know nothing going into the film. Titane is a weird, wild and masterful mix of the tender and the shocking, body horror and family drama, the malleability of flesh and mind. Ducornau has not only avoided the sophomore slump; her second feature is better than her first.
The film focuses on Agatha Rousselle’s Alexia, a woman who develops an unhealthy sexual obsession with cars after a crash when she was a child. Years later, she works as a dancer at an auto show and feels more in common with machines than men. She’s also a serial killer. To run from the cops, she takes on the identity of a boy missing for decades and goes to the boy’s father (Vincent Lindon), who welcomes her with open arms.
Ducornau mixes genres and tones as deftly as she mixes bodies, machines and gender identities. The tone shifts would be abrupt enough to give viewers whiplash in any other hands, but that’s not the case here. Alexia can be cuddling with a lover one moment and brutally murdering her the next, and dancing to Future Islands 30 minutes later and it just makes sense. Everything in the film is geared to specific questions about the human body; no matter the film's form, those questions are its constant focus.
Titane starts in one place and ends in a completely different spot. But the ending gives the audience a stark reminder of where they’ve been and leaves them with more questions than answers.
It helps that the actors, Rousselle and Lindon in particular, are fantastic. They’ve fully bought into Ducornau’s vision and are capable of pulling it off. Rousselle gives one of the best lead performances of the year, twisting and contorting her body as her character’s gender expression changes as much as by choice as by necessity. Yet it can be argued it’s not her story, that it’s more about Lindon’s fire chief than Alexia. He’s certainly a more sympathetic figure.
Titane is a film only a female director could make. Maybe only one Julia Ducornau could make. It’s so idiosyncratic and weird and has so many questions and answers about family and identity that it’s hard to see it coming out of any other mind. This is a film that needs to be seen to be believed, and it deserves to be believed.