Every Palme d'Or winner brings its own set of high expectations into play and earning this year's top prize at Cannes is a body horror that has already garnered notoriety and made headlines for making several viewers faint with its gruesome imagery & disturbing content. Bold, beautiful & bewildering, Titane is the latest offering from a singularly audacious new filmmaker and it is delightfully deranged.
Written & directed by Julia Ducournau, her sophomore feature makes her directorial debut look tame in regards to its uncompromising vision & provocative power. Led by a smashing performance from debutante Agathe Rousselle, the plot concerns two characters who find their missing pieces in each other's voids and though visceral & uncomfortable at all times, the film never discards its heart or humanity.
Adding to its alluring quality & bizarre nature is the aggressive camerawork, charged visual flourishes, sensory sound & hypnotic soundtrack. Throughout its 108 mins runtime, the film sheds old skin to embrace new contours and even though its structure & presentation is all over the place, it does find & retains emotional coherency in the characters' unfolding arcs, deftly rendered by both Rousselle & Vincent Lindon.
Overall, Titane is an original, ambitious & refreshing delight that fascinates & frustrates in equal measure and more than lives up to the designated tag of "the most shocking film of 2021". A mashup of several genres that aptly juggles intimacy with violence, brutality with kindness, shock with awe & flesh with metal while making for a wickedly gripping study of gender fluidity, Ducournau's latest establishes her as a creative powerhouse.
