I don’t care who you are. You’re my son. You’ll always be my son. Whoever you are.
Titane (2021) dir Julia Ducournau
“Following a series of unexplained crimes, a father is reunited with the son who has been missing for 10 years. Titane: A metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys.” (imdb)
Director: Julia Ducournau
Music by: Jim Williams
Titane will still be probably my favorite movie of both 2021 and 2022. I know I am taking big risks here. Still, I consider J. Ducournau one of the best directors around and one of the few ones that is taking the French extreme cinema (also known as New French Extremism) farther afield. It comes as no surprise that it is produced by NEON. She is inheriting an unflinching, uncompromising Franco-Belge horror cinematography, yet I think she is unique altogether for her forays into what someone in a recent article aptly called “Being a Women is Full of Horror”. There is also a hint of J G Ballard out there (CRASH and Atrocity Exhibition) and Cronenbergian New Flesh.
There is nothing out there even closely comparable to this movie. Got first hint of Ducournau during her previous success – a cannibalism coming of age horror drama RAW (2016), while Titane is the final proof she will always have an ace up her sleeve.
Do not want to give any spoilers so I am going to restrict just to try and detail the way utter brutality is undermined – and imploded by some of the most tender and delicate scenes and enduring relations I have ever encountered on screen. Everything seems or feels impossible or made up – and somehow it appears strangely plausible. To me it brought back an incredible documentary mockumentary – The Imposter from a few years ago in this gender fluid way it approached family relations or inserting into a family or tacitly substituting for a disappeared son and it all makes perfect sense. There’s no judgment no condemnation here.
Fucking a car or getting pregnant with a car baby is after all not a far-fetched thing in a world of Holy Motors. There are scenes of absolute elation – ecstatic dancing and incredible fireman partie full of homoerotic charge. There are scenes that would put most slasher movies to shame. The imagery is super slick – almost videoclip (music video) like and this adds an entirely new quality to just having a plot. Its imagery and iconography seems entirely coherent inspired by a whole world burning – from California’s fiery hell to Australia’s unstoppable bushfires.
It’s hard to ignore that we seem yo be moving backwards – since the decoupling from Russian Oil dependence (politically justified) means another coupling and extractivism madness further afield. Beyond SAVE DIESEL bumper stickers (seen a few of those with my own eyes) or the all-powerful car industry lobby in Germany, there is an incredibly destructive death drive present, animated by a machinistic fetish car crash eroticism (one found in car advertising all over the world) one that has been rarely touched upon since cars became the skeleton in the closet. When we think of 1988 Akira anime we think of atomic energy – yet what is missing is that atomic energy rebranded as green – os supposed to make up for those fossil million year old sources under dictatorial control. Energy vampirism goes hand in hand with a pact with the devil and nobody seems to acknowledge this. A Kardashev level 1 civilization is being grilled, charred away – because what we have is self-combustion dependency, burn-out as a source of constant energy. Peak libido is following the price of oil while the West still cannot believe it depends on Russia or Saudi Arabia for running its motors (including war machines that are supposed to backup those oil reserves). The high-octane heroine Titane – survives a car crash, she’s the first plated cyborg that matches the exhaust pipes of our times. She is no inocent, she’s a killer, transformative and shape-shifting – yet protecting her machinic progeny (not clear if it’s real or just an effect of hallucinations caused by her prosthetics. Reducing with cars literally? No, it’s not a metaphor.
We love and live in a time when car manufacturers race to fake their own emissions and build artificially-sensitive systems that can distinguish btw the simulation and the real world conditions and avoid supervision and regulation and sell more (no matter what costs). Car manufacturers are primary authors of petrofictional cleanliness and carbon neutrality no?
They’re writing the end chapter of this petrofictional 21st c era that seems to want to circumvent any leftover human agency and decide in spite of government regulation, treaties, UN horror reports, climatologists consensus on climate crisis forums. YES (they seem to say) emperatures have to rise and Earth has to be transformed into a dessicated husk. I think one cannot embody or be attuned to these burning reality without such movies as Titane coming out of this bonfire.
TimeSpace Warps 