This year’s Palme d’Or winner didn’t just “premiere” at Cannes – it burst into the festival ecosystem like a thousand barrels of renegade crude, polluting everyone and everything around it. Centering around sleaze, sex, metal, blood, and fire, Titane is almost pornography for cars. Or maybe it’s just a porno, I’m still not entirely sure. The film begins with a car crash, as a young girl, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), becomes restricted in a titanium back brace, who upon release, develops an asphyxiation for cars. (Note: if you want to avoid spoilers for Titane, STOP READING HERE.)
This, in turn, leads to an asphyxiation for metal and fire, leading to a retribution of the people who have done Alexia wrong sexually (most of whom are male). What follows is an attack on masculinity, upheld by a metal hair stick that not only holds up her hair to hide the scarring from her youth, but also what’s expected of her as a woman, supported particularly by a scene in which she literally makes a man choke on wood. (Other viewers I’m sure will have different interpretations of the film’s theme.) During this assault via sexual revenge, she’s only able to make meaningful, passionate love to the thing that started it all – a car. Which, interestingly enough, impregnates her.
However, her violent tendencies get the best of her, forcing her to go in disguise as a missing boy while on the run from the cops. She sucks in her distended belly and physically changes her appearance in a scene so visceral, so tangible, that you feel the painful transformation she puts herself through. Miraculously, it works, when she’s taken under the care of the local fire fighter chief (Vincent Legrand) who is absolutely convinced that she is his missing son.
This writer does have qualms about the film, however. Such as, why does she kill? What is the motivation of her carnage? Against not just men, but women, too? This leads to the stakes being more grounded in the second half of the film than the first, and even so, the second act goes on just a tad longer than it needs to. But after finishing Titane, those concerns became secondary, because the product is Noé-level punk rock cinema.
And that’s as far as I’ll go. If I were to divulge any further, it would take away from the wild, insanely good time that movies today have forgotten to bring to cinemas.