Had a rough choice here to decide what movie to cover for the
2021 choice. I have seen tons of great horror movies this year, some this very
month. It could have been Antlers, it could have been Lamb, it could have One Night in Soho. It wouldn't have been Halloween Kills because that movie is apparently really bad. I could have
dug back a bit and covered Saint Maud or Green Knight or Psycho Goreman or
Malignant, all fun movies. Nobody is talking about the Rebecca Hall horror movie,
The Night House, and that movie is terrifying. I could have done the new Mike
Flannigan series on Netflix, Midnight Mass, which I loved. Still need to see
Squid Game. 2021 is a great year for horror. A Quiet Place Part II kicked more ass than it had any right to.
But ultimately, I had to pick one film to review for the series. That's the rule: one year, one day, one movie. So it was tough. But there was really one choice. There’s only one horror
movie where a lady fucked a car. Yes, you heard me right. Car fucking. That movie is Titane,
directed by Julia Ducournau.
A lady fucked a car in a movie and that movie won the Palme d’Or
at the Cannes Film Festival. Now I know what you’re thinking: “How do you fuck
a car? Like mechanically, what actually is going where?" Maybe you’ve seen Ridley Scott’s
movie The Councilor, which had an infamous “catfish” scene. Yeah, this isn’t
that. This isn’t a metaphor or an exaggeration, the lady bangs a car in a
high-art French-language movie. There is no way to make realist sense of it. But you do see it happen. And the auto-erotica is probably the least
fucked-up part of Titane.
Titane is the second movie from Julia Ducournau, but she is already a superstar in the extreme weird body horror
subgenre. Her first film, 2016's Raw was one of my favorite movies of that year. That title says
it all, it’s a movie about urges and hungers, for both food and sex and often
both at the same time. But a coming-of-age cannibalism movie is really nothing
compared to Titane. This is as extreme and uncompromising as filmmaking gets. But it never becomes overwhelming bleak. It's a gross nightmare about a bad person who does bad things to people, yet it's a hilarious fish out of water comedy? Uh, sure.
I would not recommend Titane to anybody who cannot stand David Cronenberg at his nastiest. I wouldn’t recommend it anybody who can’t handle female bodies and feminine issues. I wouldn’t recommend it children, grandparents, or adults. This movie is a Sickos-Only convention. You’re either out there, playing around with your Lament Configuration to summon Pinhead to bring you the most intense of film experiences, or somebody has dragged you along to see this just to see the look on your face.
Because holy shit. Holy
fucking shit. The things that go in this movie.
Right now, a warning: SPOILERS. When I publish this, Titane
probably will still be in theaters and discussions will still be percolating as
to what this movie is. If you’re at all interested in a movie about a lady fucking
a car and the consequences of that act, go see it now. If you're not in the New York area, you can rent it on anything. But if anything I've said sounds unspeakable horrible
to you and you don’t want that shit in your life, I’ll shake your hand and send you on
your way. Your life can continue unaltered and unmutated by everything that
follows. For everybody else, let’s get going.
Titane is a movie about Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a kind of
dancer/stripper who works auto-shows, gyrating her body over a car’s hood. This
is not the car sex, don’t be fooled, even if Ducournau puts a lot of work into capturing every spasm of her titillating gyrations. Alexia as a kid was in a terrible accident
that smashed her skull open, leaving her with a huge spiral-shaped scar over
her ear, which she reveals openly with pride. Only moments later, Titane is already off the chart in in extremity.
Alexia gets her hair stuck in the nipple piercing of a coworker (Garance Marillier),
and murders an adoring stalker fan with a hairpin stabbed into his ear. Then
while showering, Alexia hears a banging at the door. It’s a big Cadillac with
flame-decals, and she fucks the thing.
No, I still don’t understand the exact mechanism of
penetration at play here. No, I am not sure what is real and what is fantasy. I
can tell you that after this Alexia is pregnant. Yeah, she fucked a Cadillac
and has a half-human half-titanium baby growing inside her. And Alexia is not
done murdering yet, not by a long-shot.
What follows with Titane is ninety minutes of increasingly
deranged and deplorable acts. There’s an attempted abortion. There’s a
hilarious killing spree that goes increasingly wrong (Alexia would not be very
good at Hitman). People are burned alive. Then, Alexia shaves her hair, breaks
her nose, and pretends to be the long-lost son of a fireman captain, Vincent (Vincent Lindon). Against increasingly
damning evidence that this “Adrien” is really a psycho-killer with a rapidly-growing
pregnancy who is leaking motor oil as breast milk, Vincent refuses to believe
they are anything other than father and son. He has also has a serious addiction to steroids.
But it's oddly sweet. It is disgusted and depraved
on every standard of good taste. I spent a good portion of Titane
covering my eyes, unable to watch the events unfolding. There are limits I can
go to, and this is well beyond them. And yet, even in the face of absurdity of
the lie, Vincent and Alexia/Adrien are together, in an unstable genderbending
near-incestuous family. They have a sweet moment resuscitating near-dead people
to the beat of the Macarena. Nobody else can believe their bond either, but it is real.
There’s certainly no lack of ideas in Titane. It is a movie
that dares tackle male-gaze objectification with the un-sexy gruesome realities
of female anatomy. That hair scene is a kind of statement of purpose - this is the oozing, bleeding physical reality that makes up the heterosexual fantasy. But it is also a slasher movie at times. It's a pondering metaphor about modernity devouring
humanity in the union of sex and hydraulic-suspension and
tuned-motors. Titane is making literal whatever fetishistic desire is at play when we have women in bikinis dancing around
masculine-coded machinery.
Titane is often too much even for me. In terms of raw audacity, I'm not sure you can find many movies that go beyond it. This is so deeply fucked in so many ways, and yet it is disturbingly enjoyable. I love this movie. I want to see everything Ducournau does in the future. No matter what hair-brained masochistic idea enters her head, I want to see that on screen.
In conclusion, Fast & Furious franchise, you are so pathetically normy compared to Titane. You sent a car to space? Boring! Have Vin Deisel fuck a car next time if you want to impress me.
As for next time for Spooky Month it’s… well, over. That’s it. Today is November.
This month we covered thirty-one very different movies that attempted very different kinds of horror. We never repeated a director or franchise. We covered movies from twelve different countries and as many languages. We had a comedy, a musical, an anime, a theater of the absurd, and a couple piles of absolute dogshit. There were some obscure finds, a few movies unfairly dismissed, and some movies that probably need a worse reputation. But I had fun with even the bad ones. I think I did good. Happy Halloween! Go eat candy and get drunk, then let a ghost eat you.
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