Titane
Julia Ducournau (Raw) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this wild, unpredictable and extreme film about love, gender identity and the relationship between parent and child.
The official synopsis of TITANE in the catalogue of the Festival de Cannes was limited to one puzzling sentence: Titanium is a metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, giving very hard alloys, often used in the form of protheses due to its biocompatibility.
The androgynous Alexia has a fascination for metal and works as a stripper at a car show. After committing a series of violent crimes, she assumes the identity of a boy who has been missing for ten years. With a shaved head, taped down breasts and dressed in men’s clothes, she impersonates 19-year-old Adrien. His father – a troubled man addicted to anabolic steroids who leads a macho fire brigade – takes care of Alexia and accepts her as his prodigal son. A special relationship develops between the two broken souls.
Julia Ducournau debuted in 2016 with RAW, an intelligent story about sexual awakening, packaged as a gory horror film about cannibalism. She wrote film history with her second film TITANE: 28 years after the crowning of Jane Campion’s THE PIANO, Ducournau became the second female director to win the Golden Palm. A daring but also acclaimed choice by the festival jury led by Spike Lee, who had the audacity to award a young, taboo-breaking and subversive filmmaker. TITANE has often been compared to the body horror of David Cronenberg (CRASH, VIDEODROME) and the work of the Japanese cult director Tsukamoto Shinya (the TETSUO trilogy), but ultimately it is above all a rash trip to the inclusive and fluid world of Julia Ducournau.