PART ONE: A CONVERSATION WITH JULIA DUCOURNAU
Not to be dramatic, but Titane is transcendent cinema. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to 2017’s cannibal coming-of-age tale Raw is a wild ride of mythic proportions that parlays body horror, dark comedy and family drama into a singular cinematic experience. Titane (a nod to both the metal used to make surgical implements and a feminised version of the Greek deity) is the mutant child of David Cronenberg and Shinya Tsukamoto, packed with ideas that borrow from Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of gender, the Bible and the work of photographer Nan Goldin.
The film won the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, making Ducournau only the second woman to win the top festival prize after Jane Campion in 1993. It is also one of the wildest films to ever pick up the prestigious award.
Titane stars newcomer Agathe Rousselle as Alexia, a dancer with a car fetish born from a traffic accident in her youth which evolves into a serial killing streak. Playing opposite her is French powerhouse veteran Vincent Lindon as Vincent, a grief-stricken firefighter who has lost his son. The way in which their stories intersect is best left for the viewer to discover, but it makes up the emotional anchor of a film that is, beneath it’s glossy and oft grotesque visuals, a story about love.
LWLies: After the success of Raw, did you feel pressured by people’s expectations about what you were going to do next?
Ducournau: Yes, a terrible pressure. Obviously, the outside expectations were very present in my mind. But the worst part was that I had a lot of expectations for, my main fear was that I was not going to be able to give as much energy or as much love to a second film. This is a very depressing thought when you’re trying to do something. I was paralysed for a year, unable to write anything. Somehow it transformed into a form of anger against myself and also against the world – against all these silly expectations. I was sick of comparing a film that I hadn’t even written to a finished film. This lost year, as bad as it was, plays a big part in the fact that is so radical, because at one point, I was really in this kind of ‘fuck off’ mood.
