• 18/06/2022
• By binternet
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[Critique] Titanium: Palm of audacity or simple gender effect (s)?<

Features

A bold gold palm

Palme d'Or-Surprise from the 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival awarded by Spike Lee, Titane by Julia Ducournau has been talked about as much as he divided critical and spectators.Beyond the consecration of the French genre film, this second feature film by the director of the excellent and disturbing serious has indeed caused a stir by her frontal violence, but above all by refusing all lukewarm and assuming with panache herParted at the limit of close-shop without ever apologizing.

Between violence, sensuality, suffering of the flesh, transformation of bodies and fluidity of genres, the filmmaker gives birth to an imperfect work, sometimes bordering on the grotesque, often breaked, but which fascinates and ends up moving in an unexpected way inIts second part after an introduction as hectic as it is upset.

A raw inception of formwork and ultra-referencing

After a decade 2010 when the cinema tended to be more psychologist, explaining and sometimes overexplicating the behavior of the characters, Julia Ducournau takes the side of pose her intrigue and her anti-heroine, Alexia (magnetic Agathe Rousselle), frankly, by contenting herself with a very minimal context before the young woman kills a flop of people in record time with a bun baguette which could just as easily be a ice peak.

As a child, little Alexia does not really seem to be able to arouse the interest of her father: she may kick the driver's seat, he barely reacts, until he realizes that'She did not put her seat belt and does not pivot violently, causing an accident that applies her daughter to have a titanium plate on the side of the skull.Leaving the hospital, the kid with a shaved head like Eleven in Stranger Things (a visibly assumed wink) sticks against the car glass and embraces it.Because the machine has had an undoubtedly more lively reaction than the father since its birth?Or because thanks to her he gave him a minimum of attention?

We cannot be sure and the image may seem incongruous, but the fact remains that adult, Alexia continues to devote a real cult to cars by participating in auto salons where she dances languidly on the most beautiful sport displacements-An activity that earned him a little reputation in the world among these gentlemen.

Tenth and contained in the extreme as soon as it moves away from cars, Alexia seems to be sickly afraid of contact with others ... while having, basically, a desired desire and hunger in the matter.Except that at home, any contact can only be violent and end by the death of the person of which she was physically or emotionally close, if only for a moment.In the first 20 minutes of the film, the bodies thus pile up at such a speed that it would appear almost comical (Ducournau arrives very well to disseminate humor without pouring in the second degree), while passing a fewImages and cult styles from cinema to the reinforcement by reinterpreting them in its own way in a visual euphoria at the height of the murderous frenzy of its protagonist: Crash (we will come back), Christine, Fight Club, Orange Mechanical, Lost Highway, Tarantino,Winding-Refn… everything goes!

A visceral film beyond the exercise of style

From that moment, either we embark on the titanium train, or we stay on the bottom side.Despite its visual mastery, the film will indeed be able to put off some by its flashy appearance or its way of ostentatiously displaying its references or by the apparent absence of justification for the behavior of its anti-heroine, which ultimately becomesunderstandable that in the eyes of the second part in the fire station - and, again, it will rather be the spectator to instinctively feel things, the director, and it is all in her honor, refusing to explain what isimplicitly present and understandable.

Because titanium is a deeply visceral film that speaks as much of flesh, desire, intimacy as our need for contact and love - as many themes already present within Grave.Nevertheless, this second long is also more conceptual and, on this side, sometimes threatens to reach its limits by bidding.

Body horror and merger body-machine: a conceptual background used too artificially

This is more particularly noticeable in the body horror part of the story, halfway between crash, Videodrome and Alien, which is ultimately the least convincing of the film and whose director could have easily happened while telling the same thing significantly.The tribute to Cronenberg is a little too supported and the references to Crash do not really work because, in his way of showing the erotic-morbid fascination of Alexia for cars (which gives rise here to a miracle pregnancy!), JuliaDucournau clearly loses the Cronenberg film's film, which also agitated its characters.

However, we understand the conceptual interest of the filmmaker to appropriate the idea of the body-machine fantasy by filming the pregnancy of Alexia.Indeed, titanium is a biocompatible material, which the bone of our organism is capable of assimilating - which is for which it is used for dental implants or operations in the brain or head as in the case of Alexia-and this cold metal refers as much to the coldness and lack of empathy of the young woman, that Julia Ducournau qualifies herself as “machine to the Terminator” (in the interview given to the seventh obsession), asThe crumpled sheet of cars to which the killer dedicates a cult.

And then, isn't the woman's body, after all, an extraordinary machine, well oiled, capable of all the transformations to give life?Transformations that also understand their share of fears (suffering, feeling of invasion, dead in layers ...) even if ultimately, this gestation, in parallel with his meeting and the development of the relationship with Vincent Legrand (Vincent Lindon), goGradually humanize Alexia.

A body to hand which springs an unexpected emotion

Where titanium, after having intrigued us, ends up convincing us, it is in his way of approaching the construction of the links between these two cropped beings of life.The circumstances of the meeting are improbable and not very credible (what the characters surrounding by Vincent) however, from this bias of Soap Opera (Alexia pretends to be the disappeared son of Vincent by hiding and chest while'It is sought after throughout the country), a real emotion springs and these two bodies that fight, which collide, end up telling much more than long speeches in a film where the main protagonist must undoubtedly pronounce less than 10phrases (short).

The bodily dimension of the film goes much further than the only transformation of Alexia's body due to her hidden pregnancy: Julia Ducournau seizes her characters with her body with her camera and says a lot about them, their identity and their relationships between them, in a way that the only dialogues could never have achieved.

Bodies fluidity and gender disorder

We have talked a lot about the concept of gender fluidity in the press and this dimension is obvious, even if the director never commits the misstep to tell the spectator what he must think or feel in front of this.Instead, she knows how to transcribe and make us experience the trouble that traverses the characters.

This is for example the case of the scene of the party in the fire station.The director films these bodies of men in uniform and reveals the almost feminine grace of their movements without the slightest irony - and even with a certain tenderness.When the group urges Alexia (they take for Adrien, the son of their boss) to dance from the top of the truck, this one, after a moment of hesitation, begins to reproduce the gestures and the moving stripperthat she was performing at car fairs.The camera embraces the young firefighters, more and more uncomfortable in the face of this indefinite body, which they associated until then that of a man, and who disturbs them in spite of themselves.The spectator himself is both hypnotized and confused in the face of this “gender disturbance” (to use the title of the famous 1990 essay by Judith Butler).

It must be said that, unlike a film like Boys Don't Cry (Kimberley Pierce, 1999) who was interested in the journey of a trans trans concealing his biological sex to his new friends, Alexia does not adopt identity hereof Adrien only by opportunism, to escape the police.At least at least, since she will get attached to Vincent and learn to love through the father-son relationship that is established between them.To the point that the leader of the firefighters goes so far as to affirm "it doesn't matter who you are, you will always be my son", even though the towel falls from the shoulders of Alexia (who will not pronounce his name as a woman at the end) to reveal her swollen breasts.

The notion of masculinity is also explored, in what it can have androgynous but also more "virile", without moralizing dimension there again. Julia Ducournau has understood that the images are better than long speeches and the way she films her characters is enough eloquent in herself. No discourse on toxic masculinity here but, again, in filigree, crossed views on different types of masculinity: that almost maternal and all in curves of the young obese black man who is one of the victims of Alexia at the beginning, that of Young firefighters (to the personalities otherwise different), that of Vincent, obsessed with the idea of ​​remaining muscular and in good shape even he has long vacillated from the inside, but also physically (the close plan where he injects himself Steroids in the buttocks - whose appearance reveals his age - while looking at his curved torso to the mirror is eloquent) and finally that of a nest nest that Alexia decides to project into the skin of Adrien, a child who disappeared ten years earlier; A transformation for which she cuts her hair in a hurry and farts her nose against the edge of a sink.

An imperfect, but courageous and touching work

What is striking and knows how to move beyond the only intrigue-imperfect-of the film, is the form of tenderness that the director experiences for her characters (and the body of her characters), which goes beyond judgmentmorale that one could have on their actions.She never seeks to excuse, but knows how to grasp, through violence, the suffering, the love that emerges from them, through their melee and their silences too, their full and whole humanity.The use of music and some known tunes also goes in this direction.You have to see Vincent Lindon and his solid body bodybuilded as a madman of love dancing with Alexia/Adrien to try to put him in confidence.Or the attack of the young transvestite woman, which gives rise to an incredible and poignant body to hand where the strength of the love of the Father replaces the violence of the blows and stops a gesture whose outcome could have been fatal.

All this, despite the flaws and the flashy aspect that one could find at work, make titanium a damn but daring, courageous and ultimately touching film.On the theme of the fluidity of genres, the director knows how to disturb the spectator without much discourse, by her only look and a visceral approach to the representation of bodies and work with her actors, all very convincing and invested.

On this side, we are more convinced than the wild boys, the visually superb film and full of plume of Bertrand Mandico, whose conceptual/intellectual/comic dimension of rehearsal with 10th degree had seemed too artificial in hisImplementation, despite an interesting bias on paper.The word economy shown by the filmmaker here plays her advantage and allows us to immerse ourselves completely in his chaotic and yet terribly human universe.

We then forgive her a fairly disappointing and mechanical fantastic dimension (this is the case to say!) And a scenario-pretext, much less mastered than that of Grave, from which she manages to make the most of (in her human dimension,at least) by fully assuming what could have passed for big inconsistencies.A palm (and a short work) to discover therefore and which we hope will continue to encourage the development and highlighting of a French genre cinema sometimes looked at high - or at least too often relegated to the “margins”For an audience of followers.

Article written by Cécile Desbrun.