- Dir: Julia Ducournau. 18 cert, 108 min
One night in July, outside the Petit Majestic bar in Cannes, I confidently told a friend that Titane had no chance whatsoever of winning the Palme d’Or, the festival’s coveted top prize. Julia Ducournau’s oil-slicked erotic shocker about a murderous exotic dancer who is impregnated by a car had just brought the house down at its evening premiere, and social media was already slathered with the greasy details. But to me, it felt very much like a Twitter cause célèbre sort of film – one whose must-see status rests largely on the need to confirm for yourself that it actually exists. “For films like Titane, the scandal is the prize,” I breezily declared.
Well, when you’re wrong, you’re wrong. Not only did Titane win the Palme d’Or four days later, but jury president Spike Lee mistakenly blurted out the result at the very start of the ceremony, as if its coronation couldn’t wait another minute. Almost six months on, this unruly techno-sexual oddity is also opening in UK cinemas at the height of Bafta season, presumably with a view to winning the hearts of British Academy members too. Crazily, France also selected it as their official entry for the international feature category at the forthcoming Oscars, though Academy members declined to shortlist it.
To me, this seems exactly the wrong arc for a film built for heat-of-the-moment outrage, and which wears its transgressive credentials so proudly it often feels as if Ducournau wrote it with an I-Spy Arthouse Sensations book propped open by her laptop. The 38-year-old director of the superb cannibal coming-of-age thriller Raw has returned with this lighter horror-drama – less startling and substantial than her debut, but watchably mad nonetheless.
Our heroine is Alexia, an inscrutable young woman with a titanium plate in her skull, acquired in a childhood car accident that was her fault entirely, and which left her with a long scar that curls around her right ear, like a bloody bass clef.
As an adult, played almost wordlessly by the striking French model Agathe Rousselle, she works as an auto show “booth babe”, twerking on the bonnets of outlandish vehicles for the pleasure of male attendees. She also has a busy sideline in serial-killing, and uses her sharp, slender hairpin to dispatch unwanted admirers and one-night stands alike. Or the human ones, at least. She’s rather keener on the vintage, flame-sprayed Cadillac on whose bonnet she finds herself writhing at a dancing engagement, and in whose back seat later that evening she becomes pregnant, without another human being’s input.
