Titane (Movie)

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    Their Film Is One of the Weirdest Prizewinners of the Year. Deal With It.

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    “Titane” may follow a female killer who has sex with a car and impersonates a man’s son, but the director and star say it’s really about love.It’s when Alexia’s breasts start leaking motor oil that there’s no mistaking the father of her baby was the tricked-out Cadillac she had rough sex with after the erotic car show, the night she killed a guy by stabbing him in the ear.That’s before she goes on a killing spree, breaks her nose and disguises herself as the missing son of a fire chief on steroids who agrees: she is his child.That is just a glimpse of the harrowing happenings in “Titane,” Julia Ducournau’s audacious splatter-drama that opened Friday. The film is winning prizes and critical acclaim for its comic carnage and upending of gender — and for a raw performance by the newcomer Agathe Rousselle as Alexia, who’s carnally attracted to cars.“Titane” is also generating dropped jaws and screams from filmgoers scandalized by its gory, outré approach to the story of a woman who, as Ducournau put it, “is driven by her impulses and desires for the dead material that is metal” but who “starts getting in touch with her humanity step by step.” One reviewer called it “the most shocking film of 2021.”A scene from the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at Canne.Carole Bethuel/NeonSitting at a French-enough bistro the day before “Titane” had its first screening at the New York Film Festival, the word Ducournau used most often wasn’t “berserk” or any other scary-sounding adjective reviewers have used. The word was “love.”“The whole point with my film is to make you feel what the characters feel, but it’s hard to make you feel love, to physically feel it” cinematically, she said. “So I decided to do it as a challenge and ask: can you do that with love?”Rousselle, too, used the word to describe the movie in a separate interview: “You have this beautiful love story between my character, who has never been in love before, and a father who doesn’t think he can ever love again and they find out what loving means and what love means,” she said. “Love is the movie.”At 37, after just two feature films, Ducournau, a Paris native, has already become a genre film sensation. In the view of Alexandra West, the author of “Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity,” Ducournau’s work is “extreme and absurd but also human” and “part of the driving force behind what’s to come for cinema.”“She’s challenging audiences and getting audiences to react to cinema and to talk to each other,” West said. “That’s exciting.”Ducournau said, “The whole point with my film is to make you feel what the characters feel, but it’s hard to make you feel love, to physically feel it” cinematically. Jeanette Spicer for The New York TimesThe director M. Night Shyamalan took notice: Ducournau directed two episodes of the macabre AppleTV+ series “Servant,” for which he’s an executive producer. “Julia Ducournau killed it. Brooding, shocking & cinematic,” he tweeted.Reviews of “Titane” have been mostly celebratory (Entertainment Weekly called it “outrageously good”) while still mindful of its grisly bravado (“the work of a demented visionary.” IndieWire wrote). Others wondered: to what end? In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott wrote: “For all its reckless style and velocity, ‘Titane’ doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.”In July, “Titane” was the surprise winner of the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first time a woman had won the award since Jane Campion in 1993 for “The Piano.” Ducournau said she was in disbelief until she hugged Sharon Stone and wouldn’t let go. Then the actress asked how she was feeling.“I said, I’m not sure yet, but it feels like history?” Ducournau said. “She started laughing, only the way Sharon Stone can laugh, with no stress and no tension and super radiant, and she said, honey, it is history.”Ducournau was caught off guard at the beginning of the ceremony when Spike Lee, president of the jury, was asked to name the first prizewinner but instead accidentally revealed “Titane” was the first-prize winner. He later said he “messed up,” and apologized to festival organizers.“At the moment it was hard to find the humor in it,” Ducournau said. “But in retrospect, I find it very much.”Ducournau said she knew she wanted a nonprofessional to play Alexia. After her casting director found Rousselle on Instagram, Ducournau said, she made Rousselle return several times over six months before giving her the job, and they worked together for a year before shooting.To prepare for a physically demanding role involving extreme transformations, Rousselle studied dance and boxing, and learned wrenching monologues from other films and shows, like the “Twin Peaks” graveyard speech delivered by Laura Palmer’s best friend.Rousselle also spent up to eight hours a day getting in and out of makeup and prosthetics that gave her larger breasts, expanded belly shapes and three different noses (for a look-if-you-dare nose-breaking scene). It helped that she had worked as a model favored for her androgyny.“Gender was never relevant to me,” said Rousselle. “When I worked in fashion I would take off my clothes for a fitting and they would say, you have boobs? I would say yes, deal with it.”Beneath the gore is a film that’s affectionate in its scrutiny of love and family, made by a director who cares deeply about family, identity and, most tenderly, the lives of women.Rousselle studied dance and boxing for her physically demanding role.Jeanette Spicer for The New York TimesWomen in transformation, actually. That’s what Ducournau explored in her short film “Junior” (2011), about a teenager whose body seeps goo as she evolves from tomboy to girly-girl. She explored transformations again in her debut feature, “Raw” (2017), a blood-soaked coming-of-age story about a young woman who gruesomely converts from vegetarian to carnivore to cannibal.She does it again in “Titane” with Alexia, a woman whose pregnancy (thanks to that Cadillac) and whose propensity to kill at random are connected to the titanium plate doctors put in her head after a car crash she survived as a girl. (“Titane” is French for “titanium.”)Ducournau, left, and Rousselle, who said the movie has been repeat viewing for some French teenagers.Jeanette Spicer for The New York Times“Titane” opened in France in July, and Rousselle said she had been heartened by the response from “the nerdy crowd of high school kids who play video games and have blue hair.” Some have seen the film multiple times, she said.Rousselle thought the movie could be important to teenagers “because it goes through the questions of how you want to be and who you can be and how you can escape where you’re from and how much control you can have in your life,” she said. “It’s freeing for them.”Ducournau said that as she mulls her next project, she found inspiration in the work of the photographer Nan Goldin and the directors Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini and especially David Cronenberg. In his movies — like “Crash,” about people turned on by car accidents — she said that “everything that people find repulsive could be shown as human.”“A vision that transcends expectations inspires me very much,” she said. More

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      ‘Titane’ Review: Auto Erotic

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      Julia Ducournau’s new film, a prizewinner at Cannes, is a grisly, philosophical thriller that puts the pedal to the metal.Alexia is a strip-club dancer in the South of France whose hobby — her compulsion, her kink, her vocation — is murder. As the bodies pile up and the law seems to be closing in, she leaves the house where she lives with her parents and takes on the identity of Adrien Legrand, a boy who went missing many years before.Having seen a computer-generated image of the teenager Adrien might have grown up to be, Alexia fashions herself into a plausible likeness, cutting her hair short, binding her breasts and smashing her nose against a bathroom sink. The disguise works well enough to convince the boy’s dad, Vincent, the ultra-manly commander of a fire-and-rescue squad. But there is a complication: Alexia is pregnant. The father, as far as we can tell, is a Cadillac with hydraulic suspension and a custom paint job. As the pregnancy progresses, Alexia starts to lactate petroleum.Maybe we should back up for a moment. “Titane” is Julia Ducournau’s second feature. The first, “Raw,” which also included a character named Alexia (and one named Adrien), was a gruesome, witty, insistently thoughtful quasi-horror movie about sex, cannibalism and the varieties of hunger. Awarded the top prize in Cannes this year, “Titane” consolidates a filmmaking style based on visceral shock, grisly absurdism and high thematic ambition. Violence is often played for comedy. Cruelty collides with tenderness. Eroticism keeps company with disgust. Through the stroboscopic aggression of Ducournau’s images you can glimpse ideas about gender, lust and the intimacy that connects people and machines.Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) may be a little of both. As a child, she survived — and caused — a car crash that left her with a titanium plate in her skull. That explains the title of the movie, though not the character’s fascination with motors, which predated the accident, or the bloodthirstiness that drives her adult self. Titanically alluring, she seduces men and women before attacking them with a metal shank that doubles as a hairpin. After driving it through one guy’s ear, she wipes it clean as if she had just checked the oil in a car’s engine.There is slapstick as well as dread in the way Ducournau stages Alexia’s crimes. “How many of you are there?” she asks as a quiet evening of one-on-one homicide threatens to turn into a mass casualty event. “I’m exhausted,” she complains to one of her victims, who actually seems to feel sorry for her.Rousselle, a model making her film debut, has a sullen magnetism. Her iciness is edged with melancholy. Once Alexia becomes Adrien, moving in with Vincent (Vincent Lindon) and joining his crew, she seems less like a predator than a vulnerable, isolated misfit. Lindon, an avatar of weary, blue-collar masculinity, seems at first to be too obvious a foil for Rousselle. But Vincent turns out to have kinks and complications of his own. He fights aging with heavy doses of steroids, and seems willfully to overlook signs of his supposed son’s real identity.His firehouse is a cauldron of unchecked virility and barely suppressed homoeroticism. He insists that Adrien/Alexia will be one of the boys, with some special privileges. “To you, I’m God,” he tells the men, adding that his son is therefore Jesus — but also, the audience knows, a kind of Madonna figure, carrying a miraculously conceived child. This is what I mean by high thematic ambition: “Titane” is a movie concerned with gender politics, metaphysics, the nature of love and a great deal more.It’s no wonder that those concerns don’t entirely cohere, given Ducournau’s furious sensationalism. The hectic, brutal intensity that drives the first part of the movie, before Alexia becomes Adrien, dissipates in the middle, as the narrative engine sputters. The pregnancy supplies some suspense, of course, but the situation becomes curiously static, and the provocations increasingly mechanical. For all its reckless style and velocity, “Titane” doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.TitaneRated R for sex and violence, in and with cars. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      An Eerie, Thrilling Trip to the Toronto International Film Festival

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      With theaters at 50 percent capacity, our critic found herself somewhat isolated as she took in highlights like “The Tsugua Diaries” and “Hold Your Fire.”“Would you like to move to the orchestra?” a voice from the dark whispered.I was at the Toronto International Film Festival and, moments earlier, had just realized that I was the only festivalgoer in the very capacious, very empty balcony. In normal years, this 2,000-seat theater, a festival mainstay, is packed with excitedly buzzing attendees. But normal is so very 2019 as are crowds. It felt awfully lonely up there with just me and some ushers, so I said Sure! and ran down to the orchestra, settling amid other attendees who, perhaps like me, were trying to feign a sense of togetherness — at a Covid-safe distance, of course.One of the largest film happenings in the world, the Toronto festival celebrated its 46th anniversary this year and, more gloomily, its second year of putting on a show during the pandemic. On a number of levels, it was a success: Although scaled down from its preplague era, the festival, which ends Saturday, presented some 200 movies, in person and digitally, from across the world. There were premieres, panels and lots of mask-muffled “Have a great day!” from the staff. Benedict Cumberbatch — the star of Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” and Will Sharpe’s “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” — popped in via satellite for a chat.It was much the same while being profoundly different. More than anything, as I attended movies in the festival’s eerily depopulated theaters — sitting in rooms that, per Canadian safety rules, couldn’t exceed 50 percent capacity — I was reminded that a film festival isn’t simply a series of back-to-back new movies. It’s also people, joined together, and ordinarily jammed together, as one under the cinematic groove. There is always vulgarity, of course, the red-carpet posing, the Oscar-race hustling, and I’ve watched plenty of profane monstrosities at Toronto, Sundance, et al. But even when the movies disappoint, I am always happy at a festival, watching alongside people as crazy about movies as I am.Benedict Cumberbatch, left, and Jesse Plemons in “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/NetflixThere weren’t many people, but there was still a lot to like and to love in Toronto, including Cumberbatch flexing his muscles in the nude as a 1920s Montana cowboy in Campion’s magnificent “The Power of the Dog” and playing a rather more buttoned-up cat fancier in “Louis Wain.” A charming, poignant biographical account, that film portrays the life of a British artist who, starting in the late 19th century — with pen, vibrant ink and a fantastically wild imagination — helped teach the joys of cat worship to a dog-besotted Britain. The movie may make some gag, but I dug its tenderness and Wain’s work, which grew trippier the older and more mentally unstable he became.For higher-profile selections like these, the fall festivals — Telluride and Venice recently ended — serve as a legitimizing launchpad for the fall season, a way to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of movies also vying for attention. Disney can scoop up spectators by the millions. Titles like “The Power of the Dog,” which falls under the fuzzy heading of art film yet is entirely accessible to those actually paying attention, need to seduce a smaller viewership, even if Campion has long been a revered auteur. They need festival audiences, critics included, on the front lines, particularly if a movie is headed toward next year’s Academy Awards. (“Dog” is more likely to go the Oscar distance than Wain’s cats.)And, after months and months of streaming new movies in my living room, I was exceptionally happy to be at Toronto. I’ve attended the festival for years, largely because of the variegated bounty of its offerings, from the commercial to the avant-garde. When it was founded in 1976, it was called the Festival of Festivals, partly because it screened films that had played elsewhere. It was intended for the general public (Cannes is invitation-only), a mandate that helped give Toronto a democratic vibe. In the words of one of its founders, Bill Marshall, “There’s something for everyone, but not everything for everyone, but something.”A scene from “Hold Your Fire,” about hostage negotiations.InterPositive Media, via Toronto International Film FestivalIn the decades that followed, Toronto rebranded itself as the Toronto International Film Festival and opened a handsome complex called the Lightbox in a soulless area called the entertainment district, where construction crews always seem to be building glass-and-steel apartment complexes for young professionals with dogs. Even so, the event’s populist ethos continues, as does its hodgepodge programming. Here, as usual, you could catch movies that had played in Berlin, Cannes and Telluride and would soon make their way to New York and beyond. One of the best things about Toronto, though, is that it isn’t an auteur-driven festival or an Oscar-baiting one: It’s just a flood of movies — good, bad and indifferent.There were teary melodramas, cryptic whatsits and period dramas like Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” which is as watchable as it is predictable. A story in black-and-white — visually and in its beats — the movie takes place in the title city in the 1960s, just as partisan violence descends on a cozy street where Catholic and Protestant families live alongside one another in dewy harmony. Centered on a cute tyke nestled in the bosom of a loving family whose members are mostly known commodities (Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds play the grandparents), the movie is in the vein of John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory,” a far finer coming-of-age story set during World War II.Among the other offerings were movies that belong to familiar subgenres that I call the Sad Single Women With Dying Plants Movie (“True Things”) and the ever-popular Damaged Woman Film, some more outré (this year’s risible Cannes Palmes d’Or winner, “Titane”) than others (“The Mad Women’s Ball”). And then there was Edgar Wright’s frenetic “Last Night in Soho,” which is a female-friendship movie of a kind and putative empowerment story about another sad woman (Thomasin McKenzie) and her glamorous sad doppelgänger (Anya Taylor-Joy). The two meet across time in a London crawling with mean girls and unspeakably predatory men.Jacques Cousteau’s life is examined in a new documentary.Story Syndicate, via Toronto International Film FestivalAs usual, the documentaries were often a sure bet. Although “Becoming Cousteau,” about the underwater French explorer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, is a fairly standard biographical portrait, the director Liz Garbus manages to push the movie into deeper depths. Filled with beautiful archival images of pristine waters, the movie opens as a fairly straight great-man story only to evolve into a thoughtful examination of what Cousteau’s early adventures wrought, including his lucrative work-for-hire helping to find oil in the Persian Gulf. As development progressively destroyed the undersea world that he helped illuminate, Cousteau became a fervent environmentalist — too late but still laudable.More formally audacious were two of my festival highlights: “Flee,” a Danish movie about an Afghan refugee, and “Hold Your Fire,” a jaw-dropper about a decades-old American hostage crisis. Directed by Stefan Forbes, “Hold Your Fire” looks back on a 1973 robbery in Brooklyn that went catastrophically wrong when its painfully young perpetrators were discovered midcrime. (Forbes also edited the wealth of archival material and shot the recent interviews with survivors and witnesses, like the psychologist Harvey Schlossberg, the definition of a mensch.) The incident quickly mushroomed into a televised spectacle and became a turning point in hostage negotiating; more than anything, it exhumes an instructive, bleakly relevant chapter in the city’s long racially fractious history.“Flee” is focused on an Afghan refugee, a friend of the documentary’s director. Final Cut for Real, via Toronto International Film Festival“Flee,” directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, is a beautifully, at times expressionistically animated documentary — punctuated with shocks of unanimated newsreel-style imagery — about the filmmaker’s longtime friend, Amin (a pseudonym), a refugee from Afghanistan. The two met in high school and remained in touch, but it was only when Rasmussen started making this movie that he actually learned the real difficulties and intricacies of Amin’s story. “Flee” unwinds piecemeal as Amin — often lying on a couch, as if in a shrink’s office — recounts his harrowing travels, with a brother or alone, in a journey that, in some painful ways, is ongoing.My favorite movie of this year’s festival, “The Tsugua Diaries,” doesn’t easily fit into any obvious genre category, which is one of its attractions. Like some other titles in this year’s festival, the movie was shot during the pandemic, but it is also very much about the pandemic. Or, rather, it’s about time and its passage as well as friendship and the deep, life-sustaining pleasures of being with other people. It was directed by Maureen Fazendeiro (she’s French) and Miguel Gomes (he’s Portuguese) who are a couple, and is both formally playful — its divided in chapters, each of which take the movie back in time — and unexpectedly moving. I wept buckets, and I can’t wait to see it again. More

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      In-Person New York Film Festival Unveils Lineup

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      Opening with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the event will include the body horror tale “Titane” and the Harlem Renaissance adaptation “Passing.”The Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane,” about a serial killer with rather unorthodox sexual tastes, and the Sundance critical hit “Passing,” an adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel by Nella Larsen, are among the highlights of the 59th New York Film Festival, organizers announced on Tuesday.After last year’s virtual edition, screenings will be held in-person with proof of vaccination required, although there will be some outdoor and virtual events. (More details on pandemic protocols will be released in the coming weeks.)As previously announced, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s solo directing debut, will play opening night, Sept. 24. A take on the play by Shakespeare, it stars Denzel Washington in the title role and Frances McDormand, the director’s wife, as Lady Macbeth. The centerpiece of the festival will be “The Power of the Dog,” the first Jane Campion film in more than a decade, and “Parallel Mothers,” from Pedro Almodóvar, will be the closing-night title.The main slate will feature a mix of premieres and highlights from earlier festivals. The body horror tale “Titane” made headlines last month when its director, Julia Ducournau, became only the second woman (after Campion in 1993) to win Cannes’ top prize. Other titles from the French festival heading to New York include “Benedetta,” Paul Verhoeven’s 17th-century lesbian nun potboiler; “The Souvenir Part II,” Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama about a film student in 1980s London; and “The Velvet Underground,” Todd Haynes’s documentary about the band synonymous with Andy Warhol’s New York.From Sundance, “Passing,” directed by the actress Rebecca Hall, who adapted Larsen’s 1929 novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as childhood friends who reconnect from opposite sides of the color line. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated “Flee,” which won the Sundance world cinema documentary prize, focuses on a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.Other titles of note include Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth; the comic-drama “Hit the Road,” from Panah Panahi, son of the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi; and two films from the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, “In Front of Your Face” and “Introduction.”Passes are on sale now; tickets to individual films will go on sale Sept. 7. Go to filmlinc.org for more details. More