In 2021, a film directed by Julia Ducournau gained quite a notoriety being described as a genre-defying body-horror flick, which received the valued Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In this film, the titular character Alexia is known to have a metal plate in her skull owing to an accident while childhood, but she leads an eccentric lifestyle as a stripper trembling not with fear but delight as she drags down the knife, slashing people, and towards this extraordinary life there are no skips. Following the horrifying incidents she experiences, Alexia impersonates a man and seems to foster surrogate longing in Vincent the firefighter – who is also a lost man but an ironical optimist. It must also be said that Titane is a bizarre film about who one is, how one survives and lives through a traumatic experience, and what happens to the individual thereafter, in a film that brings together horror, science fiction, and beautiful humanity drama.
It was the brassiness featured in Titane that amazed me. Ducournau does not comply to only one genre and produces a film that is brutelly violent and at the same time strangely mild. The film contains numerous graphic images that belong to the body horror genre and can be quite difficult to bear, yet they are not purposeless as they also embody the themes of acceptance, metamorphosis, and relationships. These are heightened, particularly when Alexia’s mechanical pregnancy is portrayed, and whehter it is sculpted to alienate the audience and entice them into the assesses veil. I must admit, it was as if I got enshrined into this unfathomable plot, dreaming story where Ducournau truly dares in every shot.
Remarkably, only the second movie directed by a woman is the one which takes the Palme d’ Or and this is Titane, and there was some praise and blame when Ducournau got this film. More interestingly, despite the mixed reception, Titane earned around $5million at the box office, a whopping amount for any experimental film. To me, the most interesting thing in the film Titane is that Tsang was not afraid to provoke public just for the sake of it, she was able to present emotional and touching family relations, questioning the concepts of sexuality and bonds. It’s one of those rare films where you come out of it, feeling both traumatized and emotionally satisfied, which makes the film difficult to get out of your mind.