New controversial film by Julia Ducournau, Titanium has caused a lot of ink (and vomit is said to have..) to sink since its summer release and Palme d'or at the Cannes festival. While the genre film has long been the poor parent of international awards, the consecration of Titanium would symbolize a renewed victory of punk Like Tarantino or Cronenberg at other times when transgression was perhaps a little less Mechanical... Attempted analysis and recommended reading to the reader after viewing this curious UFO. Sensitive souls abstain!
Freaks or carnival of aberrations
Voulue like a « absolute experience » his own words, Titanium borrowed from various sub-registries of cinema, slasher to the fantastic, through a social mirror of the most intimate: the body as aberration. Aberration etymologically refers to the action of misleading, to the deviation, the deviation from the expected norm or even to the disorders inherent in the brain. In constant mutation, the question of identity through the titanium body is the perfect illustration. What happens then when the monster was purged from being?
Julia Ducournau's previous work, Serious, recounted the fall of a girl tormented and hurried despite her into cannibalism. The film addressed the theme of the body begged by a society finally more anthropophagus that her heroine herself, a society sick of recognition and under the pressure already represented by hazing among young graduates in the process of becoming. Awakening to desire and deviance in the face of a smooth world, the end of adolescence is a crisis, a rite of one state to another, from childhood to adulthood. The director continues her introspective work here, always with a new figure of the monster, this time even more marked by the identity question. The casting of Grave's main protagonist, Marillier Garance recalls tacit filiation and torch passage death between the two films.
Following a car accident, a young girl was operated on and was given a titanium plaque in her brain. « Don't hesitate to report behavioral disorders but normally everything must go well » alerts the surgeon as a foretaste of the coming flood. The least we can say is that it will derail very quickly. The film takes us about ten years later in a first part typed Mass waller where the heroine Alexia – played by Agathe Rousselle in his first role in cinema – is now obsessed with metal, even if he embodies a serial killer Bloody titanium coldness.
« Titanium: highly heat and corrosion resistant metal, giving very hard alloys »
Titanium is the image of heroin, which has a near clinical to death relationship that it cultivates in return. The symbolism of the fire will also be spun throughout the film, at the beginning suggested on the jacket or car of the young dancer, then explained by her adoration for the flames during a particularly Freudian scene. He then followed a patchwork of raw violence, like the feature film High voltage alexandre Aja, but decorated with black humor scenes. The unloved heroine in the middle catharsis, fills the perfect figure of the monster that threatens the established order and its values. It remains to be determined who the monster or human will triumph until the last minute of the film. Titanium will take another turn after a meeting with a family father, Vincent, destroyed by the loss of his son Adrien, disappeared for years. Substitution and transfer of neurosis will then lead the two characters to a completely different register, while Alexia will take the place of the son. Behind the monster is still a trace of repressed humanity. Conjuring and overcoming traumas constitute the spine of Titanium. This script change with the encounter of two lashes of life is a frank success, which gives rise to surrealistic paintings with notes of humor well felt.
This tipping point - rather destabilizing - will completely reverse the vapor and relationships of two characters ruined by life. Resolutely feminist by his approach, Titanium produces images of plural women and cultivates hallucinating scenes where sexual identities mix, until totally blends into the figure of Alexia who will transvest as a man to abound the madness of Vincent, captain of firefighter in mourning for fatherhood. In the resolutely masculine middle of the barracks, Julia Ducournau does not hesitate to transvestinate the codes and fantasies during completely barred scenes. Hounded on a truck, Alexia dances, grimmed as a man, in front of angry firemen and very quickly disturbed by the Malaysian sensuality of Adrien, mutic and yet revealed by his body. True reversal from the beginning of the film where men watch women who exhibit and dance on Cadillacs during an elegant work and a rock dance that would not deny Sin City. The transvestite desire in the closed and virilist environment of the barracks is here disturbing because more intimate, subject to the spectre of a two-sided identity. All these questions were asked by the director throughout the film and still question by their automaticism a little too blatant and sometimes agreed.
« Thanks to the jury for letting the monsters in. »
The excellent performance of the fortune duo of Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon will be praised. Vincent's character gives rise to staggered scenes and in perfect agreement with the ambivalence of a captain in the grip of a return of fatherhood tinted with a love that was dislodged by the ego. « If I am God to you, my son is Jesus » Is he throwing at young, mocking recruits? While the portraits produced give rise to successful scenes both in terms of production and photography, the film flirts with a mosaic effect that sometimes legitimately questions the intended purpose. Some may blame him for his supposed gratuity, which in 2021 is no longer a real guarantee of transgression. Yet Titanium never fall into the gorone and hemoglobin effusion. The murders are executed with as much coldness as violence. Sometimes accompanied by a deaf sound, they recall tinnitus and trauma of the initial car accident. Titanium in reality as much from Crash of Cronenberg that in aesthetics and themes specific to certain films noticed in the last twenty years like Death Proof or Bullhead.
The torn body is omnipresent, on steroids or at the test of pregnancy until deliverance for both protagonists and spectator. Once released from the monster, are harmony and tranquility necessarily found? If Julia Ducournau is the first woman to receive the supreme prize alone and the second after Jane Campion, the gold palm awarded to Titanium It is also part of a film that upsets the codes and consensual representations. A key mirror that reminds reality of the proximity of fiction and the vigour of very contemporary issues. An embryo of victory?
[...] intriguing and to the fragrant political resonance. And when Kahn exposes his references (Titanian and Atlantic, see quote below), we understand where his inspirations come from: [...]
[...] Lies Bleeding recalls Titane (read our review) by its ability to question the functions of genres. We think of this cult scene of the film [...]
[...] like or not Titanus (read our review), recognize that there was food, and the refractories could at least [...]