![]() ![]() ![]() As a grown up, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) is the star showgirl at a motor club, grinding her body against the steel and chrome, as if the metal in her head is dictating a sexuality well off the Kinsey spectrum. In the opening scenes, a little girl named Alexia suffers a severe car-crash injury that leaves her with a titanium plate in her skull and a scar above her right ear that resembles discarded brain matter. But a disarming sweetness sneaks its way into the film, too, as the conventional boundaries of gender and family are scrubbed away and a relationship defines its own terms. Its heroine’s body is stretched and mutated in Cronenberg fashion, and as she recedes ever more dramatically from social acceptability, Titane stirs intense alienation and loneliness. There are the expected sights of seeping wounds and bloody gashes, along with the far less expected sight of a woman lactating motor oil, but for all that Ducournau has made a surprisingly emotional film about transformation. ![]() The surprise winner of this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Ducournau’s second film, Titane, takes fluidity as its central theme, in multiple senses of the word. This is why you can relate to them, because they are not these heavenly creatures they are real people with real feelings, and when they go down, they go down.” In her work, bodies tell their own, very visceral stories. As she said in a 2017 interview with the Guardian, “In every movie we see, women have to be beautiful and fit or whatever the hell, and they have to fit a certain box, and no: women fart, poop, pee, burp. The hosts of Cronenbergian body horror are typically men-think James Woods in Videodrome, Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, Peter Weller in Naked Lunch -while Ducournau has seized the opportunity to explore women’s bodies, much as fellow Frenchwoman Marina de Van did in her little-seen (but superb) 2002 film In My Skin. ![]()
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