Titane

TITANE   ***

Julia Ducournau

2021

IDEA:  In order to evade the authorities, a female serial killer with a titanium plate in her skull disguises herself as the missing son of a grieving firefighter.

BLURB:  A trans-humanist modern monster fable in the vein of Under the Skin, Julia Ducournau’s Titane explosively grapples with ideas around gender, sex, and corporeality. The locus of its drama is Alexia, whose titanium-enhanced body and protean, androgynous appearance mark her as a cyborg. An “illegitimate fusion of animal and machine,” in the words of Donna Haraway, she represents a displacement of “the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities.” At least partially. In its first half, Titane keeps the possibilities of this cyborg politics generously open. It presents us with a monstrous woman forged from near-death trauma and the interpenetration of flesh and metal, someone symbolically born from machine. Ducournau charts her radical physical transformations with a grueling, forensic eye. Her camera and sound design conspire to place us inside Alexia’s increasingly self-mutilated and transmogrifying body, a body that acts as a destabilizing force to the hyper-masculine worlds in which she finds herself. It’s a minor disappointment, then, that after its bold and deeply unsettling first act, Titane eases into something relatively conservative and predictable. The polymorphism of Alexia’s cyborg body is undercut by her uterine pregnancy, the biological specifics of which are detailed in excruciating (albeit superbly rendered) images of her scarred, bloated, oozing abdomen and breasts. Such maternal horror, reactionary in nature, feels at odds with the film’s more progressive attitudes toward gender and the body; so too does Ducournau’s decision to have Alexia reformed under the influence of a father figure. For all its gestures toward feminism and the trans-human, and beyond its Extreme Cinema aesthetics, Titane is ultimately most effective as a rather simple story of traumatized people recovering their humanity by learning how to love and be loved. Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon are exceptional in carrying this narrative, the power of their performances largely filling in for those grand potentials in Titane that go unrealized.