Julia Ducournau brings the blood, guts, and big feelings.
The relentless physicality of Julia Ducournau’s films can be horrifying. Her debut, Raw, became notorious for causing a few viewers to pass out during its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016. Indeed, the French filmmaker shares predilections for blood and guts with the likes of David Cronenberg — but even as she renders her subjects using genre tools, she brings a unique, lyrical sensibility to her work. Her shock and gore are not as simple as pleasure and pain.
As the movie progresses, Ducournau further dissolves the distinction between human and animal, good girl and naughty woman. After a harsh day of hazing involving a lot of animal blood and raw rabbit kidneys, Justine wakes up in the middle of the night with a full-body rash, violently red and itchy.
Alexia teaches Justine how to kill discreetly to satisfy her needs, but the sisters begin to set in on each other. Toward the end of the film, the sisters start fighting publicly, attacking and biting one another, sucking at the wounds they're inflicting. The other students stand by and watch them, horrified. This evokes the shame and secondhand embarrassment of any public display of misconduct, but Ducournau turns standard schadenfreude into pure disgust as the sisters draw blood.
Whereas Raw puts the relationship between humans and animals under a gory microscope, Titane considers other dichotomies: the ones between human and machine, feeling and unfeeling. For all intents and purposes, adult Alexia, now an erotic dancer who performs in car showrooms, is a machine. This is the film's most perplexing and shock-inducing metaphor.
Though Alexia uses Vincent’s vulnerabilities to her advantage, she eventually finds herself rather attached to him, too. If she is a machine, she is one on the verge of breakdown, her insidious desire for connection resulting in severe malfunctions. This is another one of Ducournau’s metaphors: the body as a failing machine. In the end, Alexia’s body does fail her — and it’s the titanium plate, the very thing ostensibly holding her together, that kills her.
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