Via Alexia’s surprisingly effective assuming of the guise of a teenage boy, we almost enter a new film, though Ducournau depicts the space of the fire station and the erotically charged filial and paternal relationships that course through it with the same heightened attention to overwhelming sensations and strange configurations of the body as in Titane’s first act. While Raw also surprisingly evolves into a story of sisterly solidarity in the shadow of troublesome family legacies, the melding of body horror and daddy-daughter bonding in Titane is more of an abrupt left turn, narratively speaking. If she’s parading something, it’s her desire for the embrace of the inorganic. As the seductive grinding gives way to obsessive licking, it becomes clear that Alexia isn’t satisfying any kind of conventional exhibitionist streak. Ducournau illustrates this early on with an utterly hypnotic, flagrantly male-gazey sequence scrutinizing the parts of the woman’s scantily clad, writhing body in the same way that the opening shot takes us through a roaring engine. Alexia’s role as a dancer who gyrates on top of expensive vehicles makes her into a sexual object for the men who flock to watch her, but for Alexia it’s clearly always been about a fusion with the metal. As in Crash, both the novel and David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation, this sexual encounter is rooted in a near-death experience in an accident, one which left Alexia with the metal plate in her skull.Īt question early on in Titane is the way bodies become seen as machines, instrumental objects with components and fluids onto which we project our desires. The exact, well, methodology of the intercourse is unclear, but we get plenty of shots of the sedan’s broad front end bouncing up and down like it’s being powered by hydraulic pumps. Within Titane’s first half hour, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) realizes the fantasies of the characters in Ballard’s Crash when she has sex with a souped-up sedan that appears to manifest in the garage of the show room where she works as an exotic dancer.
JULIA DUCOURNAU SERIAL
The film also ratchets up Raw’s combination of body-horror explicitness and art-film abstraction, making for a wild ride through a female serial killer’s techno-sexuality that would make J.G.
Julia Ducournau’s feature-length directorial debut, Raw, contains gory car crashes and family dynamics whose utter depravity proves eerily relatable, and the filmmaker’s follow-up, Titane, expands on the French filmmaker’s idiosyncratic interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration.
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