Who among us, confronted with the sleek lines and gleaming steel of the contemporary automobile, has never yearned for the tender merging of machine and flesh, an improvised coitus in which man’s love affair with the motor car is brought to its necessary and natural conclusion? What’s that you say? Nearly everyone? In that case, Julia Ducournau’s Titane really is one of the most bizarre films in recent memory.
The story of a sexual deviant-turned-serial killer-turned-con artist, Titane is the kind of filmmaking disaster that one relies on studio heads to sabotage quietly. Alexia (Adele Guigue) is 7 years old when a road accident forces doctors to place a titanium plate in her head. Two dozen or so years later, the character (now played by Agathe Rousselle) is working as a car show girl when an aggressive fan spurs her to an appalling act of violence. Recovering in the dressing room shower, Alexia hears the inviting purr of a hot rod on the showroom floor. She approaches, and, well, let’s just say the car’s shocks will never be the same.
That Alexia’s bout of “auto” erotica is by no means the strangest of Titane’s plot points says much about the grotesque specificity of Ducournau’s vision. The director, previously, of Raw, 2016’s whacked-out cannibalism bildungsroman, Ducournau excels at the assemblage of inexplicable images but has little to say beyond, “Made you look.” Working from a script of her own composition, the auteur guides her protagonist from horror to horror without offering so much as a cursory explanation. Why does the unspeaking Alexia murder at least five people in the scenes following her rencontre sexuelle? Why, having locked her parents in a burning house, does she assume the guise of Adrien, a young boy who vanished a decade earlier and whose father, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), is pitifully eager to believe that the androgynous weirdo at his doorstep is his long-lost son?
Though the relationship that results from Alexia’s impersonation provides Titane with a much-needed emotional narrative, its contours are intelligible only in comparison to the puzzling events on display elsewhere. Vincent, an aging fire captain who maintains his physique with intravenous steroids, is so overwhelmed by grief that he won’t allow himself to draw the obvious conclusions about his “son’s” identity. Alexia, made pregnant by her mechanical copulation, binds her belly and breasts with increasing fervor but lives in understandable fear of discovery. From an archetypal perspective, both Vincent’s self-deception and Alexia’s growing anxiety make sense: Each proceeds from a recognizable psychological wellspring. What is less clear is why this particular man and woman seem to form a legitimate bond over the course of the movie. A mutually beneficial con job is one thing. Authentic affinity, signaled by Ducournau but never explored or earned, is quite another.
If the fault for this indeterminacy lies primarily with the filmmaker, audiences will nevertheless find much to dislike in Rousselle’s portrayal of the adult protagonist. A courageous performance insomuch as the actress spends much of it mute, affectless, and naked, Rousselle’s rendering is high on commitment but low on the subtlety needed to humanize the deranged Alexia. It is, of course, exceedingly difficult to express with one’s face and body the motivations that a screenwriter’s dialogue ought to convey. Rousselle, however, hardly seems to be trying, carrying out her character’s butcheries and perversions with all the emotional forthrightness of a coma patient.
Among the results of Titane’s inability to evince any method behind its madness is a film that feels at once shocking and empty. Clearly, Ducournau has something to say about bodies, but so slippery are the movie’s ideas that one barely catches sight of them before they dart into impenetrable thickets. Failing to help matters is the artless unrestraint with which the director depicts the film’s myriad brutalities. (Viewers may wish to avert their eyes at 3:19, 12:02, 21:13, 25:02 …) In the absence of a discernable moral context, the violence on screen is not merely distasteful but distracting. It obscures the truth rather than revealing it.
Titane is not, it must be said, the worst serious movie ever made. That honor, for my money, goes to Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016), which juxtaposed equally repellent images with shots of Amy Adams reading a book. What the two pictures have in common, besides a fruitless interest in sensational crimes, is their utter disdain for the notion that filmmaking is a communicative art. In Titane’s case, coherence might have been achieved through additional footage, but only if the audience’s old-fashioned love of storytelling had been honored. That love can be mocked, ignored, or subverted. It cannot, however, be eliminated.
One of the quirks of cinema is that a spectacularly bad film is often a work of great ambition. Indeed, Ducournau’s baffling canvas may well mask a vision of some urgency, requiring only a superior artist’s skill to bring forth. Perhaps it was this possibility that the Cannes Film Festival’s jury wished to concede when it awarded Titane the 2021 Palme d’Or. That has to have been the case, in fact. The jury can’t possibly have enjoyed the show.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
