Titane (18.)
Directed by Julia Ducournau
Starring Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier. Subtitled. In cinemas on Boxing Day. In cinemas on Boxing Day. 108 mins.
There is one born every minute, and at least half of them pop out in France, which may explain this home spawned winner of the prestigious Barn Door prize at this year's Canz Film Festival: a bone-cracking, head-stabbing, skin-puncturing body-horror comedy in which a lesbian showgirl serial killer with a titanium plate in her head gets impregnated by a car and then violently reshapes her physique to pose as the son of a fire chief who went missing 10 years ago. Yep, and a merry Christmas to you too.
The obvious issue some people will have with this film is that it is repellent. Ducournau's approach is unflinching; this reviewer's slightly less so. I flinched; a lot. And squirmed and averted my eyes. Most of all though I kicked myself for agreeing to be put through this. Will I ever learn? Must I always be a slave to sensation?
After the first third the visceral assault lets up a bit. This is a mercy, but once you have become accustomed to looking consistently at the screen you may start to wonder why you are being shown this. It may be tapping into modish notions of gender fluidity and human/machine synthesising but a lot of it is ancien chapeau, rehashing ideas explored in early Cronenberg, Crash, Tetsuo, even Holy Motors. Reminding audiences of the frailty of the vehicle they are travelling in has always been a surefire way to get audiences squirming, but Titane seems to be fuelled by a kind of corporeal self-loathing; it isn’t celebrating the new flesh, but expressing its disgust at the old one.
If you click with it the film could be an uproarious atrocity exhibition, a gleeful black comedy. The two main performances are undoubtedly strong. You could argue Rouselle's screen debut is more like a piece of performance art than acting, but it is effective. Lindon is superb as an ageing tough guy, injecting himself with steroids to try and keep the musculature that defines his masculinity. The scenes of him naked in front of a mirror injecting into his bruised buttocks are in some ways the most disturbing in the film, because you feel the human pain that is being expressed, rather than empty outrage.
Directed by Julia Ducournau
Starring Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier. Subtitled. In cinemas on Boxing Day. In cinemas on Boxing Day. 108 mins.
There is one born every minute, and at least half of them pop out in France, which may explain this home spawned winner of the prestigious Barn Door prize at this year's Canz Film Festival: a bone-cracking, head-stabbing, skin-puncturing body-horror comedy in which a lesbian showgirl serial killer with a titanium plate in her head gets impregnated by a car and then violently reshapes her physique to pose as the son of a fire chief who went missing 10 years ago. Yep, and a merry Christmas to you too.
The obvious issue some people will have with this film is that it is repellent. Ducournau's approach is unflinching; this reviewer's slightly less so. I flinched; a lot. And squirmed and averted my eyes. Most of all though I kicked myself for agreeing to be put through this. Will I ever learn? Must I always be a slave to sensation?
After the first third the visceral assault lets up a bit. This is a mercy, but once you have become accustomed to looking consistently at the screen you may start to wonder why you are being shown this. It may be tapping into modish notions of gender fluidity and human/machine synthesising but a lot of it is ancien chapeau, rehashing ideas explored in early Cronenberg, Crash, Tetsuo, even Holy Motors. Reminding audiences of the frailty of the vehicle they are travelling in has always been a surefire way to get audiences squirming, but Titane seems to be fuelled by a kind of corporeal self-loathing; it isn’t celebrating the new flesh, but expressing its disgust at the old one.
If you click with it the film could be an uproarious atrocity exhibition, a gleeful black comedy. The two main performances are undoubtedly strong. You could argue Rouselle's screen debut is more like a piece of performance art than acting, but it is effective. Lindon is superb as an ageing tough guy, injecting himself with steroids to try and keep the musculature that defines his masculinity. The scenes of him naked in front of a mirror injecting into his bruised buttocks are in some ways the most disturbing in the film, because you feel the human pain that is being expressed, rather than empty outrage.
