[FILM]
TITANE
She’d always been the shy, retiring type.
★★★★
OUT 26 DECEMBER CERT 18 / 108 MINS
DIRECTOR Julia Ducournau
CAST Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier
PLOT Erotic dancer Alexia (Rousselle), who has a car fetish, enjoys a sexual liaison with a motor and acts upon her worst murderous impulses in the French region of Martigues. To evade capture, she heads on a bizarre journey that thrusts her into the world of a lonely fire captain (Lindon), where a peculiar bond is formed.
OBJECT SEXUALITY, THE romantic attraction to inanimate objects, is hardly the most conventional subject for cinematic exploration, but 2021 has seen the release of two films that shine a light on this taboo desire. While Zoé Wittock’s Jumbo takes a sweet, tender approach to its love story between a young woman and a fairground ride, Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning Titane crashes into Cronenberg-esque body horror at full speed. It’s an unsurprising direction for the French filmmaker, who flexed her horror muscles with cannibalistic coming-of-age drama Raw five years earlier, but that film was just a hint at where her audaciously warped sense of storytelling would take audiences. And the twists and turns of Titane make for a darkly thrilling yet weirdly poignant vehicle for her wildest ideas.