Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so intense, so out there, that it grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the end credits begin to roll. Titane, Julia Ducournau‘s second feature film, is one such example.
But how does a French body horror film manage to leave such an indelible mark on its viewers? Let’s take a closer look and see why people are still talking about Titane to this day.
What Titane Means to Us
I’m still coming to grips with Titane. I went in looking for some gruesome body horror and, yeah, I got that. Plenty of that. But I also got a meditation on identity, gender, love and what those things can look like and mean to different people. Alexia/Adrien is kind of a monster – not because of their fascination/attraction to vehicles, but because they’re a serial killer. The film asks us to identify with them, and the people they meet. The people that grow to love them. I don’t know that I found any answers about the issues the film raises – or if I need to, in a film that features a woman posing as a man giving birth to something like a cyborg – but I couldn’t look away. I don’t know how to feel about the film, or the characters. I’m repulsed and fascinated and full of a weird kind of pity and… is that hope? I dunno. Like I said, I’m still coming to grips with it. I think it’s worth the work.
–Bob Cram
Titane was the first movie my wife and I went and saw since theaters shut down because of pandemic restrictions. I remember suggesting it to my wife. “What’s it about?” she naturally asked. I admitted I had no idea but that it looked a bit avant garde. Like most normal people, she suggested we watch the trailer.
Her finger was hovering over the play button when I said “What if we go in blind?” She was skeptical and asked why we do something like that. So I asked her what the last movie we saw that we knew nothing about before going to see it. She thought for a second and said, finally “That Tim Burton musical. The Barber of something.”
“Bingo.” I said.
She was confused, and for good reason. She pointed out that we hated Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. We hate musicals. We left the theater after eating our food and never saw the rest of it.
“Why would you use that movie of all movies as a reason not to watch a trailer before seeing a movie?”
I asked her how many times we’d told that story. “A lot.” she admitted. I asked her why. “Because it’s funny?”
“Because it was memorable. If the movie had been good, we would have talked about it on the way home, and that would have been about the end of it. We would have forgotten the experience, if not the film itself for the most part. But we remember it because we skipped out on a movie that we paid for. Because we both hate musicals and because it’s funny that we had no idea going into it that it was a musical.”
She thought it over. So I pressed my case.
“How many of the stories that your friends tell over and over again involve something that went wrong? Someone got drunk and did something embarrassing in front of a bunch of other people or someone got sick after having a bad meal at a restaurant and then shit themselves on the way home or two of you showed up to a party wearing the exact same outfit? Why is it that those are the stories that get retold and not the ones where everything goes right?”
“Those are the stories that always get retold.” she said.
I had her on the ropes now. So I doubled down.
“I don’t know what the answer is, but I think it has something to do with the unexpected. How often do we go to movies nowadays without knowing the RT score or without at least watching a trailer? And that goes for everything really. Think about it. We google everything before we commit to it. Restaurants, stores, hotels, vacation destinations, the place you get your haircut or your oil changed. Hell, you don’t even have to google a movie to eliminate the element of surprise these days. Between twitter reactions and pop up advertisements on websites, we know nearly everything we need to know about a movie to decide if it’s going to be a good experience or a bad one. And if we still aren’t sure, we can have thousands of reviews at our fingertips in seconds—both from professional critics, the audience, and amateur bloggers. The truth is, we never really have to see a bad movie if we don’t want to. And to extend that a bit, we never really have to have a bad experience doing anything if we really don’t want to.”
“Buy the tickets.” she said.
My wife hated Titane. She covered her eyes for probably a third of the film, and we both left the movie with knots in our stomachs.
But you know what? We tell that story all the time. And we laugh, man how we laugh. Good times.
–Billy Dhalgren
The Story
Titane is set in modern-day France and follows the strange and twisted life of Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a woman who has developed a strange affection for cars ever since a titanium plate was put into her head after a childhood car accident. Strange though Alexia’s life is, as we quickly find out she has no qualms about acting on her violent impulses, it quickly devolves into the bizarre after a weirdly intimate encounter with a Cadillac after a car show.
The thing with Titane is that if this film tried to belong to any other genre it would not work. Take the body horror element out and you have a bunch of disjointed pieces that belong to at least three different kinds of stories. Ducournau’s genius lies in the fact that it’s the increasingly gruesome horror of Alexia’s situation that ties everything together and keeps the viewer engaged until the bitter end.
The bulk of the story sees Alexia attempting to build a new life as “Adrien”, the long-lost son of Vincent, an aging fire captain. However, with something strange and unnatural growing inside her, it seems only a matter of time before things go irreparably wrong for Alexia.
Questions of Identity
Aside from the nearly unhinged violence peppered throughout the film, Titane might be best known for the changes in gender identity the main character goes through and retains for the bulk of the film. Alexia’s change from herself to “Adrien” is so complete, that if one hadn’t seen the opening act of the film one would have a hard time believing that they started the story as a model.
Gender identity isn’t exactly a core topic in the film’s story, but it is interesting how Vincent, the real Adrien’s father, reacts to Alexia’s deception. There is much that isn’t said that reveals how one should behave in the presence of gender non-conformity and I think it’s important that Ducournau put all this in the film, especially now in the 2020s when the topic is being discussed more than ever.
The Need for Love
None of this quite answers the initial question though: why has Titane gained such a death grip on viewers since it arrived in theaters three years ago? I believe it has something to do with Ducournau using body horror to lay bare one of humanity’s most primal desires: the need to be loved.
While the metaphor isn’t quite perfect, as people can’t actually make love to cars, it still works enough for the story Ducournau is telling. Alexia is clearly starved of love with her human family, which leads to her seeking affection elsewhere. This impulse is strengthened after the car accident, as it seemingly confirms to the young Alexia that her parents don’t love her, but she can always find “love” in a machine, a car in this instance. But here, as in real life, chasing “love” to the exclusion of all else has consequences, and Alexia experiences them to their fullest, albeit with a body horror twist that easily burns itself into the mind.
In conclusion, Titane is absolutely a film to be remembered for many years to come. The story and the visuals that reach out and grab your attention are all part of a film that demands to be acknowledged and seen for what it is, and I hope many people do in the years to come.
Have you seen Titane? Share your experience with the film in the comments!
