It’s a horror film, a genre rarely awarded at Cannes. And it’s a woman’s film, the first at the top of the charts since The Piano Lesson by Jane Campion. Titanium is in any case a film which put the Croisette in a state of shock. With the fist and the force of its astonishing images.
Touching Saturday night on the stage of the Palais des Festivals, the director Julia Ducournau said of her film, her second after Serious, that it is “not quite successful” and even that one can say “that it is a monstrous film”.
Breathtaking beauty
Above all, it is a film of both extreme violence and breathtaking aesthetic beauty. We can feel the influence of David Cronenberg with this languid way of manhandling bodies. We can just regret a slightly light scenario. But the film is worth for the performance of its actors. Agathe Rousselle, whose first role in a feature film, and what a role! That of a silent serial killer employed as a pole dance dancer to excite the guys in the middle of the cars. And Vincent Lindon dumbfounded as an aging firefighter on steroids.
Moving from feminine to masculine in an extremely subtle way, Agathe Rousselle abuses the notion of gender with a mixture of sweetness and brutality that is really impressive. The film divided on the Croisette. It was not the favorite of the special envoy of 20 minutes, but let us at least recognize the merit of deciding in international film production by a particularly singular way of doing things. Which is not nothing.