Get Your Engines Revving For 'Titane': Julia Ducournau's New Film

Upper West Side NY

22 October, 2021

11:36 AM

Description

Columbia Daily Spectator BY ALLANAH ELSTER OCTOBER 20, 2021 Twenty minutes into the U.S. premiere of "Titane," a new film from director Julia Ducournau, a handful of audience members stood up in complete shock and walked out of Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. This was a rather tame response in comparison to the ambulances that have been called during past screenings of Ducournau's work. Ninety minutes after the first batch of unprepared viewers departed, more moviegoers stood up—in fact, the entire audience rose to its feet in a resounding standing ovation. As the credits rolled, Ducournau stepped out to glance at her handiwork: a room full of stunned, moderately disturbed New York Film Festival audience members bursting with endless questions about the journey they just endured. Ducournau first began studying screenwriting in her home country of France and continued her education at Columbia's School of the Arts. While Ducournau's mastery of screenwriting is evident in her calculatingly paced scripts which effortlessly transcend any so-called "language barriers," it is her visual storytelling abilities that make her films so resonant and often so brutal. Her debut feature, "Raw," is a classic coming-of-age movie where the pure, innocent female protagonist starts experimenting with cannibalism in college. Her internationally successful debut falls within the genre of "body horror" but is by no means a scary movie with typical jump scares or a tense musical score. Instead, it is painfully honest and oddly relatable in its portrayal of burgeoning sexuality; any actual gore is quite sparse and measured. Her second feature, "Titane," had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the Palme d'Or. Ducournau was the first female director to single-handedly win this award; Jane Campion is the only other female director to have won the award, but she was given the honor in a tie with a male director in 1993. Summarizing "Titane" succinctly is no easy feat. Thematically, the film is about love, gender, found family, desperation, fluidity, and the essence of humanity. The film begins with a young woman named Alexia—played by Agatha Rousselle)—who has a titanium plate installed in her skull after a violent car crash as a child. In her young adulthood, she becomes a murderous dancer with an inexplicable attraction to cars. After a slew of murders, Alexia, who by now has been impregnated by a car, goes on the run. After seeing a missing-person photo of a young boy (which has been age-progressed), she decides to transform herself into a teenage version of the long-lost child. This kickstarts a fraught yet compassionate bond between the mysterious "teenage boy" and his father, a hypermasculine firefighter (Vincent Lindon). Though this premise may sound outlandish, it is rendered as an honest, tender arc. Once the balance of shock and awe settled within the crowd, Ducournau took the stage to speak about the sculpting of her work. She explained that achieving an equilibrium of seemingly conflicting tones in her work is all about the wielding of energy. "Energy is essential to me because that's exactly what I tried to do with 'Titane,' is to communicate this energy and to build up an experience that is at the same time … corporeal or sensational一all about the sensation一and also very emotional," Ducournau said. Watching "Titane," or any of Ducournau's works, feels more like an intricately constructed amusement park ride than it does a static viewing experience. Despite the film's boundary-pushing visuals and subject matter, France has decided to put the film forward as its 2022 Oscar submission. Perhaps, following last year's "Parasite" Best Picture win, another foreign language film will erode the confines of a single and othered "foreign" category. As Ducourau solidifies herself as an auteur, it is hard not to consider how her work will evolve. So far, her features have found humanity in a carnivorous, animalistic protagonist as well as a murderous and machine-like one. Ducournau acknowledges that her films are more amorphous and unconstrained than your typical three-act-structure, "textbook-type" film. "I think it's a bit hard for me to actually consider my film with a beginning and an end and then you move on to something completely different," Ducournau said. "I prefer this idea of movement, and of shedding skins somehow in order to get deeper and deeper to a form of truth." Staff writer Allanah Elster can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.