First of all, there is simply no getting around the following fact: “Titane”, the sensational winners film at the 74th Cannes Film Festival, is about a woman who has orgiastic sex with a car, then goes through a pregnancy with a lot of car grease and finally gives birth to a hybrid creature with unimaginable pain, whose spine is made of pure titanium.
Anyone who laughs in disbelief at this point and then shakes their head in disbelief is not alone. While it was previously the function of the festival to carefully continue the canon of film history towards the future, at the award ceremony on Saturday evening all boundaries were suddenly blown. That will go down in history as a moment of both excitement and disturbance at the same time.
The jury chairman Spike Lee must have felt that too. At the graduation ceremony, he wore a suit that looked like he had tossed over a freshly splattered Jackson Pollock painting. He looked disoriented and destroyed the whole dramaturgy of the evening by blurting out the title of the winning film right at the beginning. The clever puzzle of which film should get which award, including two divided prizes from a jury that apparently had to struggle for compromises in the overall package, had become pointless. It was all about Julia Ducournau, the second female director in the history of Cannes to win the Palme d’Or.
She thanked Cannes for the courage to finally free films from the “walls of normativity”: Julia Ducournau (left), director of “Titane”, receives the Palme d’Or from Sharon Stone.
(Photo: Andreas Rentz / Getty Images)
When the 37-year-old French director came on stage, she turned out to be a tall, classically coiffed, super glamorous blonde figure, next to which even the award winner Sharon Stone spontaneously faded. The words that Ducournau then spoke immediately burst this picture: She thanked Cannes for the courage to finally free films from the “walls of normativity”, for a giant step towards inclusivity, fluidity and diversity and finally for that Hall of Fame of the Palm Winner “Letting Monsters In”.
And yes, it really is to describe the main character of your film “Titane” as a monster. In the very first scene, as a little girl in the back seat in the family car, Alexia makes such a fuss that her father has an accident behind the wheel and she can only be saved with a large titanium plate in her skull. Then she feels the impulse to nestle tenderly against cars. In the next scene she is already grown up, now played by Agathe Rousselle with a disturbing dark look. She earns her money as an erotic star, the naked body is her tool.
Both men and women are drawn to Alexia, but that is a fatal attraction
This is of course in a tradition, the writer JG Ballard and his film interpreter David Cronenberg explored a long time ago with “Crash” what wild and inadmissible desire can also be directed towards the shiny chrome and curved shapes of automobiles that are in can indeed also be designed as objects of pleasure. Julia Ducournau is now adding a whole new chapter of her own.
Again, as for humans, both men and women are drawn to Alexia, but that’s a fatal attraction. From the very first kiss, murderous impulses awaken in her, a staff that she wears in her blonde hair knot serves as a deadly stabbing weapon. In this way she becomes the serial killer who leaves a trail of death in the south of France, and the hunted. The “sex” with a dominant, heavily sprung and highly aggressive old-timer Cadillac (which, thank God, is not shown in hardcore pictures) is already behind her, something mysterious is growing inside her.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, the film takes a new turn at this point: Alexia sees the poster of a boy who has been missing for decades, binds her breasts and pregnancy belly in pain and pretends to be the prodigal son of a fire brigade. Head of Operations (Vincent Lindon). By choosing this star, this male figure represents the macho France of the past, but the man himself is severely traumatized. So much so that a space for unexpected tenderness and empathy is created – this dreaded Capitaine, respected by his men, is ultimately ready to accept anyone who wants to be his “son” and every conceivable being as his grandchild …
It must have been this longing for acceptance and redemption that ultimately touched the jury, which was mostly female, with Mati Diop, Mylène Farmer, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jessica Hausner and Mélanie Laurent. It turns Julia Ducournau’s film into more than just a curiosity, it allows the conclusion that the old ways of defining the “normal” and the exclusion of everything that is different are now felt to be so stressful, even in the cinema, that almost every kind of departure is felt arouses tremendous longings towards a bond across all borders.
It wasn’t just a woman who won – she was the wildest in the competition
Cannes has always had a heart for movie monsters, they have been bustling around in the late night screenings and midnight screenings for a long time – only that was a carefully tended niche for the kind of fear and desire that one did not want to see in the canon of the celebrated award winners . Why is it that this wall has now fallen, that this film made the breakthrough? A post-pandemic greed for life could play a role, a desire to let all emotions run free after the long silence, however wild and dark they are.
Or is it a hearty comment by the jury on the selection policy of the festival director Thierry Frémaux, who defends old and traditionally male-dominated Cannes traditions at every point? You give us a competition with four female and twenty female directors to evaluate? Then let’s just lift the wildest and most inexperienced woman, who has just finished her second film, right up to the top of the world-famous red stairs in Cannes.
Will the film “Titane” consist of itself over the years, whether it actually has the inner coherence and heart logic that is necessary to make you want to see a work again and again? One can have doubts about that. And inclusivity, fluidity and diversity are perhaps above all categories of human coexistence that are not necessarily enhanced by the fact that cars are also included in the hustle and bustle in a comical way. These doubts, however, fade in comparison to the ingenious effect of this award: If there is no idea too crazy on the Croisette to go home with the Palme d’Or in Cannes – which previously suppressed stories in the minds of the filmmakers will now be released ? Honestly, we can’t wait.