Titane is at once unlike anything you’ve ever seen and yet feels lovingly familiar. It is a cinematic call-out to return to this comforting fluidity, intangible in words but innately understood. BFI London Film Festival presents Titane in cinemas on December 31st.
Female horror filmmakers are finally getting the spotlight they deserve, and that’s in no small part thanks to Julia Ducournau. Propelling herself onto the scene with her viscerally tender coming-of-age horror Raw, Ducournau left a startlingly strong imprint on everyone’s minds. Such a powerful and self-assured debut was bolstered by interviews with the director herself, creating the profile of a ferocious creative tired of the stereotypical label of female directors as ‘soft.’ As Ducournau puts it, “toilet paper is soft. I am not soft.” At first, I understood Titane as the main course of Julia Ducournau’s body-horror feast, with Raw as the entrée. After reflecting for a long time, I’ve come to realise that Titane is not only one of the greatest modern films but also one of the most beautiful love stories ever told.
Describing Titane’s plot succinctly is not something that comes easily – nothing in Titane is singular, and that includes the story itself. It’s best to tell you how it begins and leave you to discover the rest: Agathe Rousselle’s Alexia is a showgirl working at a motor show, with a penchant for the phallic and metallic and a disdain for flesh and blood. When an obsessive fan oversteps his boundaries, Alexia invites us into her journey of murder, malice and mistaken identity. Eventually, Alexia and the grieving firefighter, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), tenderly collide.
It’s immediately clear that Ducournau is challenging herself far more than she did on Raw – Alexia is deliberately inaccessible. We learn little to nothing about her, barring a car accident in her adolescence that may have sparked this motor-sexual desire. The psychopathy, however, might have been in there all along. We learn less and less about Alexia as Titane unravels, until she becomes entirely mute and, in a way, no longer exists on our screen.
Agathe Rousselle’s performance is extraordinarily layered, shifting and warping Alexia’s physicality to make her disappear before our very eyes. It feels like an incredible magic trick, but the truth is, Agathe is just an exceptionally marvellous actor. To me, Agathe’s performance is one of the most intelligent and eruditely complex ever recorded on film – to translate pure psychopathy and abjectness into such a pure, unadulterated form while maintaining bodily fluidity is supremely astonishing. It is simply unrepeatable. Despite this rigid inaccessibility, there’s something about Alexia that keeps us entranced. Perhaps it’s the very urge to understand her, in the hopes of making rhyme or reason for what she does – Ducournau conceals any kind of authorial answer, instead allowing us to deconstruct this walking enigma for ourselves.
Creating a monster purely to exist as a monster can be a fascinating experiment in itself, and Ducournau has created that challenge not for herself but for us. Speaking with her on the red carpet, Ducournau explained that “monstrousness obviously has a beauty to it because it defies the norm. I find a lot of beauty in that freedom.” Some may walk away from Titane bored or even disgusted, having refused to rise to the gauntlet Ducournau throws down in front of us. This bold declaration to release yourself from the rigidities of our known humanity displays Ducournau’s unique creative brilliance.
There’s a knee-jerk response to write Alexia off as an inhuman monster. We judge her actions against these iron-clad, rigid structures and beliefs, which lets us label them monstrous and abhorrent. We believe that these protect us as a society, but from another perspective, their immovable rigidity confines us. We reject those radically different from us and assume that, as they have shed themselves of these confines, they are undeserving of the rewards – love, comfort, safety.
Ducournau observes the ugly lie of these confines and constructs someone entirely free, unfazed by the moral and ego-driven bonds that form the bedrock of our personalities. We are terrified of Alexia’s behaviour, not because it is inhuman or incomprehensible – it terrifies us because she is us, unbound and completely, utterly free. She is fluidly human.
Titane feels so wild and unrelenting because it depicts an utterly wild, free humanity, and that sharp, visceral bodily reaction stems from our inability to comprehend such existential freedom. It’s terrifying because the violence of Alexia is us at our most human, whether we believe it or not. Through Alexia, Titane not only transgresses but also tears through moral, sexual, societal, and human boundaries with a power rarely felt in cinema. It’s, at times, unbearably visceral as it takes hold of you, possessing every fibre of your being, separating your very mind from the inessential confines of your fleshy body. It feels like a religious experience. You’re overwhelmed but somehow not scared, as you find glimpses of yourself in Alexia, if only for a moment. All of a sudden, before your very eyes, Titane shapeshifts in front of you, and without realising it, you begin to change with it.
This change is the violent collision of someone terrified of death against another, terrified of life itself. What Alexia and Vincent share is an intimately tender connection, failed by words yet spoken so vocally by one’s own emotions. As Vincent Lindon told me, “It’s a free love – they’re not obliged to love each other, and that’s very important.” Titane feels like a meditation on the isolation between body and mind, and their love is the heart of that – you cannot describe how it feels to have come home or the comfort of someone who understands you. You can merely feel it; with such a burning intensity, it may consume you whole. Fire unites Alexia and Vincent, as it both eradicates all in its way and yet gives birth to something new at the same time. It’s a love that transcends physical barriers and transgresses societal norms because it is so uniquely pure.
Titane isn’t a film you can fully understand in a single viewing. Its sharp fractals reflect a thousand different significances and meanings, and the uninitiated eye can only glimpse so many. One may interpret Titane as a viscerally intimate dissection of the human condition. It strips apart our flesh and blood to lay our humanity naked upon the screen in its most valid form, something we’ve only ever come to understand through the restrictions we place upon it. Ducournau explodes them, making the indescribable appear through her exclusive visual and thematic grammar.
Titane is at once unlike anything you’ve ever seen and yet feels lovingly familiar. It is a cinematic call-out to return to this comforting fluidity, intangible in words but innately understood. Through Titane, Julia Ducournau releases your humanity from its shackles, if only for a few hours – it’s why so many can’t put Titane into words and yet be so absolute in their feelings toward it. It is a love story dedicated to the completeness of humanity, darkness and light coming together to create a radically new soul. That soul is Titane.
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