Cinema Wednesdays - Alice Bruxelle
Noted for her first feature film Grave (2016), Julia Ducournau is quickly making a name for herself in French genre cinema. Her long-awaited second feature, Titanium, would have provoked, in addition to the Palme d'Or at Cannes, some sickness and vomiting on the Croisette. Reality or marketing ploy? No matter, because the director's audacity will leave no one indifferent.
Has Julia Ducournau heard the considerations from our editor Antoine Bernhard calling the bulk of current French cinema «fat, mawkish antics»? The director's mark is not one of mawkishness. But does that make it an accomplished film? Nothing is less certain. Because of its overly teen-movie and an overabundance of gore to fill the void in the script and characters, Grave had only provoked useless disgust coupled with boredom. Titanium wants to draw a line under the past by killing off the former lead actress (Garance Marillier) within the first ten minutes of the film, heralding a more mature and polished ambition.
Two-stroke engine
Beneath the band's powerful riffs The Kills, We discover Alexia, flanked by a titanium plate on her skull following a road accident. All this in a masterful, hypnotic sequence that already sets the tone for the experience to come. Or trial. Our shameless eyes discover her as a young dancer at a car show with the allure of a "show". cyberpunk strolling through a jungle of bare legs and gleaming bodywork. As she mimes coitus with her flame-painted Cadillac, an admirer tries to touch her, but is curtly dismissed by security. Touching with the eyes, that's all. Julia Ducournau has warned us. Our eyes are in for a real treat, right up to the point of overflowing.
Once the audience has had its fill of feminine, mechanical curves, an unsatisfied admirer tries to kiss Alexia by force, and to get rid of the pest, she sticks her bun pick in his ear. It's in the following scenes that we learn that, in addition to her profession as a dancer, she's also a serial killer, to the point of being wanted throughout the region. In the first third of the film, wild sex between a human and a Cadillac, ultra-violent murders with a bun pick and absurd humor set to Italian music follow one another in rapid succession.
Bloodthirsty and untamed, Alexia distributes death freely, even burning down her own home. Parents included. No sooner has the film reached cruising speed, and thinking she's emancipated herself from her last family barriers, the creature Alexia substitutes her murderous madness for the fear of being caught. She undergoes a radical physical transformation to become Adrien, son of Vincent (Vincent Lindon), captain of the fire department. Wanted for over twenty years, his father obsessively believes in his unexplained reappearance. As one father figure replaces another, he becomes her, integrating her into his household at the cost of a sometimes brutal domestication.
After a Tarantinesque opening, an ambiguous family drama in an impersonal apartment takes over. The human-machine relationship is relegated to the background, and will manifest itself in jabs of suffering instead of pleasure. This break in rhythm is a risky gamble, but above all a frustrating one, like a V8 engine trapped by highway limits. Speaking to Kombini, the director confides that she directs bodies, but not psychology. This impossibility of access to the characters' interiority is felt and makes the relationship futile, despite the duo's performances. Not even Vincent Lindon's tears or Alexia's progressive humanity have the desired effect.
Despite close-up shots of her intimacy, from conception to childbirth, including an attempted abortion, the director's cold, mechanical style of filming obstructs any attempt to make the characters her own. As a result, when scenes seek to mobilize emotional intensity, absurdist humor responds instead. A few laughs broke out in the audience at Alexia's «I love you» to Vincent.
Messy tote bag
The impossibility of mourning for one and the rediscovery of humanity for the other - the subjects of the film - lead to a double outcome, that of a hybrid child in Vincent's hands and the abandonment of love for Alexia. To fill this psychological void, the director opts for saturation: polished aesthetics, slow-motion effects and scenes of sometimes unbearable gore drown everything in a rather abstruse jumble, ostentatiously demonstrating a perfect mastery - perhaps too perfect - that suffocates the madness. human to the benefit of an over-oiled mechanism.
The experience Titanium can be appreciated and experienced, despite the organic pain the filmmaker inflicts on us. If she's good at filming bodies, it's in this way of displaying the elasticity, formation and transformation of each of them. The viewer is caught up in her own fantasies and disgust. Transforming his body from bimbo sexy as a browless androgyne, Alexia or Adrien, despite their shared bodies, will provoke in us either the reactions of obsessed admirers, or those of embarrassed firefighters.
Grave and Titanium are both the story of a metamorphosis that leads to monstrosity. In this respect, these films are a process whose mechanics, right up to the last detail, culminate in an extraordinary result. Is this baby with a titanium spine the harbinger of a revival in the French cinema set in motion by Julia Ducournau? A hybrid cinema, unclassifiable and out of the ordinary, despite its confirmed mastery? Once the baby has grown up, will it be able to heal its flaws? We hope so, for better or for worse.
Write to the author: alice.bruxelle@leregardlibre.com
Photo credits: © Carole Bethuel
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