Alexia has a large scar above her right ear, from the childhood accident and the surgery, and other markings left by her self-binding. “Titane” is a body-horror film that relentlessly displays the anatomical agonies its characters endure. These subtle psychological maneuverings take place alongside the hard and harsh physical realities on which the entire story, and its very concept of selfhood, depends. (An alert viewer might even suspect that Vincent refuses the test precisely because he might know what it will reveal.) Whether Adrien is Vincent’s biological son is beside the point: Vincent had (with Adrien’s mother, played by Myriem Akheddiou) raised their son until the age of seven, and no retrospective proof or doubt of his biological paternity will have any effect on his sense of the paternal bond. Yet Vincent’s active, self-reliant embrace of Adrien (let’s call the disguised Alexia that from here on) is no mere story lever-it’s a mark of what it means to be a father and to have a child. Some critics have complained that his sanguine self-confidence is implausible, a ridiculous convenience to move the plot along. The police offer to do a DNA test to prove Adrien’s identity, but Vincent refuses-he’d surely recognize his own son, he says. Here, with canny artistry, Ducournau tosses off an extraordinary detail casually, to let viewers ponder and absorb its mystery. Spotted at the airport by the police, Alexia, as Adrien, is taken into custody and viewed through a one-way mirror by Adrien’s father, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), who claims to recognize him and brings him to the firehouse where Vincent is the captain. He went missing a decade earlier, as a child, but his case is back in the news. She discovers that the car has impregnated her already a killer, she kills again (and again), goes on the run, and-cutting her hair, and binding her breasts and conspicuously pregnant stomach-takes the identity of a teen-age boy named Adrien Legrand. (The mocking tone of some reviews of “Titane” confirms this.) She tests herself in a lesbian affair but is no more satisfied with a human woman than with a human man. It’s hard enough for Alexia to cope in a world that is disinclined to take her sexual preference, let alone its reciprocity, seriously. She and the car-displaying pleasure with its ever more vehement motion and flashing lights-bounce up and down in rhythm until both climax. The vintage Cadillac that she’d been bumping and grinding on is flashing its headlights at her, and she walks to it, naked, then enters it for a sex scene, on its front seats. ![]() Then, while showering his brain goo off her body, she responds to a heavy, metallic thud at the door. But, when one of Alexia’s male fans follows her out and forcibly kisses her, she kills him-gorily, graphically-with a knitting-needle-like stick that holds her hair in place. With her unfeigned attraction to cars, Alexia is a star in the field, and, when she energetically and sinuously dances on a classic Cadillac, Ducournau renders her in ecstatically soaring images. (One woman soaps a car and rubs her breasts against a side window.) Men wander among the vehicles, taking selfies with the women. She’s seen dancing at a hangar-like venue where cars are fetish objects. Emerging from the hospital, she lovingly caresses her parents’ car-in particular, the driver’s-side window, an ingenious Freudian touch that will echo mightily through the entire drama.įlash forward, and the grown Alexia is performing as an erotic dancer at car shows. Alexia suffers a serious head injury and has a titanium plate inserted in her skull. Moments later, she unbuckles her seat belt, distracting her father and causing him to lose control of the car. ![]() ![]() But Alexia is instead growling along to the sound of the engine. As a child (played by Adèle Guigue), Alexia is sitting in the back seat of a car driven by her father ( Bertrand Bonello, himself a notable director), who’s got music on the radio. ![]() The film’s protagonist, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), has an affinity for cars that amounts to a sort of destiny. The radical fantasy of its premise-a woman gets impregnated by a car-wrenches the ensuing family drama out of the realm of the ordinary and into one of speculative fantasy and imaginative wonder that demands a suspension of disbelief-which becomes the movie’s very subject. “Titane,” the new film by Julia Ducournau, is a genre film, a twist on horror with a twist on family-like Ducournau’s first feature, “Raw.” But “Titane” is far stronger, far wilder, far stranger. In the best genre movies, the quantity and power of these effects serve as sufficient compensation for the thinned-out drama. The curse of genre is that it encourages filmmakers to downplay causes in the interest of effects.
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