Strained relationships with loved ones can create a hole in one’s psyche that is tough to fill. People with damaged relationships with a parent for example may often find themselves trying to replicate a facsimile of it with others throughout their lives, often in vain. Attempts to fill this void often results in damaged people finding each other and a hot film from France explores this topic in the most creative way possible.
Titane follows Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) a young woman who has been a car enthusiast since birth, despite having been in a terrible accident as a child that has resulted in her having a titanium plate in her head to repair her skull (hence the film’s title) and the resulting scar to match. Now an adult, Alexia performs as a stripper at car shows, where she admired by male fans. After one gets a little too enamored with her following a performance and Alexia murders him and later on a co-worker and her friends, she soon flees her home, and takes on the adult identity of a long missing boy named Adrien in an attempt to go into hiding. The boy’s father Vincent (Vincent Lindon) enthusiastically takes returning “son” in, despite the skepticism of the firefighters under his command in his firehouse. Pregnant and attempting to keep up a façade, Alexia soon learns just how much she and Vincent needed each other.
Much has been and will be written about Titane’s fantastical elements, after all, the story of a disturbed female spree killer who goes on to have a baby with a car is outside the realm of what we expect when we sit down to take in a movie. But beneath the surface of the absurdity is a story about damaged people finding each other and in their unlikely connection, finding what it is they had been searching for and what their lives had been missing. Both Alexia and Vincent wear their trauma of broken familial bonds on their sleeves, each from a different side of the parent-child relationship spectrum but suffering from the same pain of having lost, or never having had at all, a connection with the other half of this vital pairing. Of course, their relationship is built on a lie which Vincent eventually discovers, but as he shows us, the origins of their relationship matter less than its existence itself. The two characters create the bonds that both crave and need to feel whole, anything else is secondary.
What Alexia and Vincent also share is a penchant to abuse their own bodies, another theme throughout the film. Writer/director Julia Ducournau has stated her intention to use Titane as a conduit to explore the vulnerability of the human body, it’s ability to feel pain and our dissatisfaction with our own images. Alexia does modify her body throughout the film’s second half in an attempt to hide her breasts and pregnant belly and appear to be a young man instead of the young woman that she is, but I never got the impression that she dislikes being a woman. Vincent on the other hand abuses steroids extensively in an attempt to remain muscular and powerful, to both keep up with the younger firefighters he oversees and mask the deep pain and vulnerability he possesses over the loss of his son and struggle to connect with “him” once he is finally found. Through Vincent we are able to see how the body and mind are connected, how vulnerability with one is inextricably linked to the appearance of the other.
Titane is an at times brutal but consistently surrealist body horror film, but once viewers are able to think about the film and digest it past its bizarre elements, it’s core message about love and the human need for it despite where it may come from is tender and poignant even if it that message is delivered in an unconventional manner. The credit for this feat must go directly to Julia Ducournau for being able to thread this unbelievably difficult needle in making the absurd appear and feel beautiful. Ducournau’s skill as a director of actors must also be lauded as she pulls convincing, quality performances from Vincent Lindon and Agathe Rousselle, a newcomer to acting who was discovered on Instagram. Both characters exhibit underlying pain and trauma, in addition to the film’s weirder elements, and both Rousselle and Lindon impart the emotion necessary to humanize and depict their characters properly, doubly impressive for Rousselle in her first onscreen appearance. Titane is a strange film on its service, but the themes it explores are universal, even though it may take the average moviegoer a bit to process them, if at all. Still, Ducournau and company have made a striking, creative film that stands out for its willingness to push audience expectations and taste.
Image: NEON
