She heeds its call, and so begins the most virtuosic, over-the-top one-woman arthouse softcore display since Juliette Binoche’s interstellar Sybian ride in High Life. One night after work, while Alexia showers off the fluids of her latest victim, her dance partner the Caddy beckons her. Oh, and she’s also rather nonchalantly begun to rack up a body count. Afterwards she fends off leering autograph hounds and slumps around her parents’ house like a sullen teen. Now in her thirties, Alexia dances at car shows, humping a classic Cadillac with an enthusiasm beyond the call of professionalism. (In just a few scenes, Bertrand Bonello brilliantly suggests unseen layers of unpleasantness beneath that father’s disagreeable surface.) That child, Alexia, has her cracked skull bolstered by a titanium plate that, when we see her next (as an adult played by Agathe Rousselle) she’s shaved her head to flaunt. Titane begins with a car crash, as an irritable father reaches angrily into the back seat to grab his child while driving and loses control of the vehicle. And it precariously balances its tonal extremes: The more compelling you find the grisly nuance of its body-horror mindfuckery, the more willing you are to suspend your disbelief, the more likely you are to be moved by the makeshift familial relationship that develops at its center. But it’s a savvy flinch-fest, testing your nerve with an assurance too steady to be called gratuitous. Its gore per minute rate probably falls short of the pace set by Ducournau’s career-making feminist cannibal movie Raw. And Paul Verhoeven expects to shock us with lesbian nuns? How merely Dutch of him.ĭespite its bonkers premise, and some effectively lurid humor, Titane is not the trippy midnight movie bloodbath you’re looking to get high for. The French are really out-Frenching themselves when it comes to conceptually extreme movies these days, non? First Annette, Leos Carax’s garish pop operetta about the freakish CGI offspring of Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, now Julia Ducournau’s Cannes-winning Titane, the tale of a serial killer who gets knocked up by a Cadillac.
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