Let me state first up, I love many, many French films. Some of my favourite horror movies of the past twenty years are French, and a couple of French directors have films from the 80s that are amongst my all-time faves. However, French films also have the ability to really annoy me. There is something, a certain je ne sais quoi, perhaps, that can rub me up the wrong way. Actually, I know exactly what it is.
French directors often indulge themselves with sudden shifts in tone, moving from drama or suspense to farce or slapstick with little or no apparent reason. It’s usually quite jarring, and will usually pull me out of the scene. Jean Caro did it during Alien Resurrection, Luc Besson did it during Leon (aka The Professional). I know it was intentional with those examples, and I didn’t like it at all.
I don’t mind a tonal shift when it’s a deliberate gear change, halfway through a film, and then maintained, rather than jumping back and forth. Two examples where this works well is in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. In the former the tone shifts from crime thriller intensity to slapstick-horror shenanigans, and in the later the tone shifts from comedic romance behaviour to psycho-thriller suspense.
In Julia Ducournau’s second feature, Titane, she takes the body-horror sub-genre and turns it on its misshapen head, fusing it with a bizarre relationship drama between lost souls, young, deeply troubled Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) and older, grief-stricken Vincent (Vincent Lindin), and injecting it with a strange, science fiction element that is, frustratingly, never explained. I’m not sure what the three credited story consultants did on the film, but it’s a hot mess.
One must suspend belief from early on in the film as Ducournau dabbles with surrealism, wrestles with realism, slaps our face with brutality a few times, flirts with body-horror - but never really goes full Cronenberg, the way I was hoping - attempts to turn sexual ethics inside out, perverts the audiences expectations, and ultimately polarises her audience.
Ducournau stages scenes that seem completely out of place with the rest of the film, like the two, oddly homoerotic moments of the firemen dancing to techno with their shirts off, or when Alexia attacks various people in a shared accommodation home.
What on earth is going on with the scene where the Cadillac, on which we see Alexia straddle as an erotic showgirl in the film’s striking opening sequence, beckons to a Alexia, who has just brutally murdered a lecherous fan, by making loud thumps from the show room. Alexia, naked and dripping water from showering, is drawn to the bedazzled car, it’s headlights on full bore, and enters it. The car then begins to hump up and down, like a pimp ride, and we see Alexia inside, her arms stretched and bound by the seatbelts, and in the throes of sexual ecstasy. Has she been raped by the car, or was this consensual? This bizarre supernatural element is never indulged in again. Unless you count the ending of the movie, but even then, it’s oblique.
Alexia has been impregnated by the Cadillac. But we never return to the car, nor ever have this supernatural/science fiction part of the story explained, which is a pretty important part of the story, as Alexia starts to secrete motor oil from her breasts and vagina. We know at some point she is going to give birth to some sort of mutation, like a cross between The Demon Seed and It’s Alive.
Comparing Titane to David Cronenberg’s Crash, as many critics have, is tenuous. Cronenberg’s film was an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s infamous, mostly unfilmmable, Dystopian novel about a group of people who are sexually aroused by car crashes, ideally being involved in one whilst engaged in sexual activity. It’s a film about the collision (pardon the pun) of perverse desire and controlled mortality, a study of sex and violence.
Ducournau’s Titane is also a study of sex and violence, but the comparison ends there. Whereas Cronenberg’s stylistic is cold and distant, keeping the audience disturbed by its characters’ obsessions. Ducournau’s stylistic has a vibrancy, a kind of folly, urging the audience to cheer its protagonist on. Alexia is villain as anti-hero. She is an opportunistic serial killer, who murders her parents, along with numerous others, yet finds solace in the somewhat pathetic figure of Vincent, who is appears genuinely deluded about her being his long-lost son (yet another huge demand on the audience to suspend belief). He finally indicates that maybe “Adrien” isn’t his son, but he doesn’t care.
Titanium is described as a very strong metal that is highly resistant to heat and corrosion. Titane feels more aluminium than titanium. Unlike Ducournau’s stunning debut feature, Raw (aka Grave), which kept a sustained tone, Titane is not the cohesive masterstroke it’s being championed as. It’s a farrago of oneiric, raw energy, filled with some powerful imagery, but lacks any kind of clarity, consistency, and, ultimately, feels pointless. If there is a philosophy to this film, it’s very obscure. Ducournau is a talented, original filmmaker, who raised the bar high with her first movie, and has followed it up with a mish-mash that smacks of self-indulgence and self-importance.