Metamorphosis
Finally cooling off from this year’s incendiary London Film Festival, we take a look at one of this year’s most challenging and exciting films: Titane. A cyborg odyssey exploring gender and queerness, it has much to say about our relationship with the non-human world and our own bodies – here’s Xuanlin Tham to hold our hand through it.
I have a recurring dream where I am walking down a long road. I run into people I know, but they don’t recognise me. “Young man, are you lost?” a distant family member asks. Young man: it stirs in my chest, a moth beating its wings against my rib cage. Chrysalis, metamorphosis, taking flight. In my dreams, my body can overwrite the meanings externally ascribed to it: this flesh glitches, morphs, confounds.
Julia Ducournau, writer and director of Titane, has recurring dreams too. This one is more of a nightmare: she dreamt about giving birth to pieces of a car, one by one. A life-giving act that paradoxically produces something dead, as organic flesh gives rise to cold, hard metal.
Why dream again and again of our bodies transforming? Our fascination with the mutable human form dates back centuries. Ovid’s Metamorphoses tell of mortals who brush against the gods; these encounters inevitably see their bodies transmogrified into something more than human.
In tailored reversals of circumstance, hunters are turned into stags, hubristic mothers to eternally weeping stone. Stories are not told with bodies, but through them: via the grisly reshaping of flesh itself, towards the reversal.
Titane is one such odyssey. A queer myth for our diesel-drenched anthropocene, its narrative progression is umbilically tied to the trajectory of its characters’ mutations. Like our most storied myths, Titane is violent, awe-inspiring, and darkly funny; it also shares a deep and inherently queer concern for how physical and psychological transformations are sutured together. Ducournau peels back her characters’ bodies and psyches with two scalpels: one for their corporeal relationships with the material world, and the other for the instability of their gendered existence.
Alexia, played with visceral intensity by newcomer Agathe Rousselle (and briefly as a child by Adèle Guigue), has a titanium plate fitted into her cranium after a childhood car accident; emerging from the hospital post-op, she walks right past her parents to joyfully kiss their car. Cue the title card over the sultry, synthy intro of The Kills’ ‘Doing It To Death’. We fast forward a couple of years and Alexia is an adult: clad in neon fishnets and dark lipstick, she’s now a car show dancer-cum-serial killer giving the world’s most aggressively flame-decaled Cadillac a lapdance. (Side note: I now yearn to own this car.)
Lust, like the implant in her skull, is a metallic affair. It’s soon consummated in a dizzyingly gorgeous scene that Titane’s already become infamous for: a naked, dripping Alexia is mysteriously summoned mid-shower to meet her automobile lover for a fated tryst. Arms bonded by red seat-belts and writhing in ecstasy, she fucks the car. And because a film by Julia Ducournau would never hit the brakes just as we feel like we’re careening into oncoming traffic, Alexia gets pregnant.
The Ancient Romans personified the sky, the water, and the world around us as gods, giving them human desires which begot not-entirely-human offsprings. It’s only fitting that we have Titane to deify the car, one of the ubiquitous synthetic objects of our modern age – and to muse upon our intimacies with the things we create, that also create us in return. Ducournau prods at the seams where flesh and non-flesh meet, and we follow Alexia’s decidedly un-natural pregnancy to term; yet while carrying her child, Alexia finds herself having to adopt the identity of a boy (now man) who went missing a decade ago.
In several excruciating scenes, Alexia forcibly de-genders her pregnant body to pass as a man: shedding the skin (and hair, and eyebrows) of a sexed-up, cold-blooded serial killer, and binding her swollen breasts and belly so tightly we hear something crunch. Diverging from the myths of old, her uncontrolled mutation is contested and suppressed by self-inflicted transformation.
We may not ever carry a Cadillac’s child, but Titane takes pains to remind us of how we are bodily involved with our synthetic world all the same – in ways that are fundamental to our identities. Justine, a fellow car show dancer played by Garance Marillier (previously seen in Raw, Ducournau’s cannibalistic coming-of-age debut feature), has metallic nipple piercings that fascinate Alexia: at first erotically, then with a violent curiosity. Aging firefighter and Alexia’s newfound father figure Vincent (a fiercely adoring Vincent Lindon) relies on ever-increasing doses of steroids to stave off the deterioration of his hard-earned physique.
The mirror, that eternal site of queer and bodily anxiety, calls to them again and again. In Vincent’s pink-tiled bathroom, three mirrors form an arc, caging subjects between their own reflections and the inescapable knowledge that their bodies are changing against their will. Vincent desperately flexes in the mirror, scrutinising his bulging veins and slowly sagging muscles; Alexia runs her hands over the tearing skin of her stomach uneasily, attempting to process her alien image before painfully re-disguising her pregnancy to play the role of Vincent’s son. These fears are existential, deeply gendered, and to a queer audience, they are achingly familiar: both Vincent and Alexia struggle to reconcile their desired bodies with the ones they possess but cannot control, and the expectations projected upon their flesh.
But though it may seem that way at first, the gender spectrum is not the axis along which Ducournau charts Alexia’s transformation. Alexia does not become less woman and more man: why would a film so visionary constrain its imaginings within a binary, linear, and violently reductive understanding of gender? As her cyborg pregnancy develops with the same urgency as her filial affection for Vincent, he tells her, “I don’t care who you are. You’ll always be my son”. And in this messy, overwhelming realisation that she has someone to embrace her at her most grotesquely inhuman, Ducournau sets the stage for Alexia’s mythic reversal.
Alexia dances solo on the roof of a firetruck: she presents a scandalous routine befitting her old days at the car show, except now she’s bald, eyebrow-less, and wearing a fireman’s uniform that sits weirdly on her frame. Her performance so utterly explodes the suffocating categories of gender that the firemen watching her are gobsmacked. It doesn’t matter. She’s performing for herself, affirming the more-than-human, incomprehensible creature that she’s grown to love – because love was taught to her.
A mythic journey from the beautiful to the grotesque, from inorganic lust and alienated solitude to real, involved human connection, Titane claws its way out from the darkness of its origins and towards the dazzling light of liberation. In the beautiful and deranged manner that only Julia Ducournau’s films can accomplish, we understand that to get at what really lies beneath our skin, we have to embrace the monstrous first. Alexia’s body has become less and less human: but her heart’s finally started to pump warm blood.
Titane will be released in UK cinemas on December 31. It is currently out in US cinemas now.
Xuanlin Tham is a film critic based in Edinburgh who has written for The Skinny and Girls On Tops. They love strange movies that grapple with the unstable boundaries of what it means to be human, movies about queer joy, and movies about priests.
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