Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)

[kubelkind]

Loved this very much though I'm still processing it and will be for a while longer. I'm surprised nobody has commented much on the casting of Bonello here, and as the father-who-must-be-killed, no less. Obviously, Ducournau has her own voice and a strong style of her own, but I did see a distinct kinship between her work and Bonello at several junctures here, and with Raw too (and not just for the casting of Rabah Naït Oufella). The transgression of gender boundaries which bifurcates the film felt a little like a similar process in Tiresia, and the dance-as-catarsis scenes too : "She's Not There" in this and the use of "Nights In White Satin" in House Of Tolerance have a similar feel and function. Maybe I'm pushing this a little, dunno. Probably I'm just hoping that some of the justified acclaim for Titane rubs off on Bonello a bit as I love his work too. Very glad to see he has a new project in the works, at least.

[The Curious Sofa]

I loved Raw and Titane was among my most anticipated films this year but what a letdown. My main problem is that I simply did not care for the central character. Considering her actions early on, I found it impossible to empathise with her in the later stages of the film, when it clearly wants me to feel something.

SpoilerShow

Much of Titane plays like a heightened riff on the 2012 documentary The Intruder, from which it takes the conceit of a family willing to welcome the cuckoo into their nest, just to make the pain go away, but that film took its power from being based in an actual case. The car sex and ensuing pregnancy was an surreal conceit, which may blow Spike Lee's mind but to me it felt like a Cronenberg/Ballard reference shoehorned into the film. It's no more mind blowing than than Isabelle Adjani's tentacled lover in Possession, a film which more successfully builds a stylistic framework for its weird-fiction flights of fancy. Ducournau strains to say something about queerness and gender identity (looking back, also the least successful part of Raw for me) but it all felt too muddled to really make this worthwhile. For absurdist, gender-queer body horror in 2021,

I'll take the joyfully gonzo Malignant over this any time.

[therewillbeblus]

The most audacious aspect of the film is not its grisly provocative content, but in testing audiences' willingness to hold opposing feelings of (totally fair and natural) personal judgment, and humanistic empathy for one's broader pain divorced from those behaviors being judged, together. Especially in an era where a huge chunk of the population seems to be problematically diagnosing people as 'beyond rehabilitation' or dehumanizing their worth based on only observable markers, this is a very important movie to be made right now. I'm sorry you felt it impossible to locate empathy alongside judgment, though I personally believe such perspectives were likely a core impetus for Ducournau to make the film in the first place, not to compare or have empathy usurp morality or justice, but to challenge us to find new possibilities to validate these incongruous ideas separately, without defaulting to our ingrained schemas where one refutes the other out of subjective 'necessity'.

[swo17]

I didn't care for the first half at all but found the film quite resonant and moving once Lindon shows up.[/url]

What does it say about me that I preferred the first half?

[DarkImbecile]

It says you’re like me, which may be more disturbing than anything in the film

[Glowingwabbit]

I didn't care for the first half at all but found the film quite resonant and moving once Lindon shows up.

I actually decided to check out shortly after he showed up and watch something else. I probably won't return to it as the film just isn't for me even though there were parts of the first half I really liked. She's definitely talented and I can see why people love the film but much like Claire Denis (who this reminded me of) the work just leaves me cold.

Edit: I should add that for me it has nothing to with not being able to connect with the character as that's not something I care about in film. Which perhaps again is why the film isn't for me.

[senseabove]

Just to throw another negative opinion on the scale, the thing about the Denis comparison is that Titane repeatedly runs up to the kinds of ingrained taboos/disgust triggers that Denis builds her more outré movies around—Trouble Every Day, Bastards, High Life at one end, Chocolat and Beau Travail at the other—and then quickly retreats into banal body horror without actually engaging them, as if to say, ad nauseam, "look, these are analogs" without going further. Now, body horror isn't my thing in the least, but I at least found the first third's grim flippancy amusing for its moral horror, even if I was watching through my fingers for the violence; I like an unexplicated, unredeemed anti-hero as long as there's more to it than "look at how unapologetic we are about this," and I have no struggle with the teasing apart of empathy and judgement as TWBB outlined. But the whole movie is too-heavily reliant on those kinds of "autonomic" reactions, which it quickly abandons or whose ungainly lumpiness it forces into bizarre, ill-fitting, banal, "high-concept" molds—the twinning of incestuous desire and salvation and that pieta composition being the most egregious, eye-rolling example. And if that shot, for example, is supposed to be an on-the-nose stitch in the film's thread of queasy, black humor, well, that whole thread struck me as just another form of the film's flinching.

The beautiful thing about Denis is how those those kinds of reactions are left to build up and fester like a pimple. You just have to wait for it to come to a head. Her various combinations of taboo and lust, violence and ritual are enigmas in the skin of the movie, irritated, tender, and inflamed, whereas Ducournau rarely does anything more interesting here than testing patellar reflexes. And contrary to Curious Sofa, I think there's more unresolved queasiness in the dance reprise alone than the 47th shot of wound-fingering and oily discharge. I was, quite frankly, just bored during so much of the last two-thirds, and that brief explosion of the movie's gender performance conundrum was just about the only thing that made me want to sit up and pay attention.

[yoloswegmaster]

Bluray expected to come out in Jan 2022.

[hearthesilence]

Just out of curiosity, when a Blu-ray comes out that quickly, is anyone here more likely to skip the theaters and just blind buy the Blu-ray? At that price, it would actually cost me more to go to a regular theatrical screening.

[domino harvey]

It’s no quicker than a lot of other movies. The theatrical to Blu-ray window has been shrinking for years

[therewillbeblus]

Just out of curiosity, when a Blu-ray comes out that quickly, is anyone here more likely to skip the theaters and just blind buy the Blu-ray? At that price, it would actually cost me more to go to a regular theatrical screening.

If I'm excited about a film, cost doesn't factor into going to see a movie in a theatre for me, it's about the drastically different experience from watching in my own home alone. Going to see a film in theatres should boil down to how interested or invested you are in that film, and if cost is being considered as the predominant variable in that decision, well that probably already answers your question for yourself.

[domino harvey]

Bluray expected to come out in Jan 2022.

Confirmed for January 18 from Decal Releasing, a label run by NEON and Bleecker Street

[yoloswegmaster]

Bluray expected to come out in Jan 2022.

Confirmed for January 18 from Decal Releasing, a label run by NEON and Bleecker Street

It's also coming out as a part of a boxset containing other 2021 NEON films such as Spencer.

[therewillbeblus]

Bluray expected to come out in Jan 2022.

Confirmed for January 18 from Decal Releasing, a label run by NEON and Bleecker Street

It's also coming out as a part of a boxset containing other 2021 NEON films such as Spencer.

Cool, that design seems to be using similar packaging artwork to the screener box set NEON sent out- here's to hoping a second volume comes next year including The Worst Person in the World and (*holds breath*) Memoria

[lzx]

The only film in that collection I'm interested in owning on Blu-ray is All Light, Everywhere, so naturally it's only available as part of a $165 boxset. Honestly don't know what I expected given Neon's track record...

[Never Cursed]

Confirmed for January 18 from Decal Releasing, a label run by NEON and Bleecker Street

It's also coming out as a part of a boxset containing other 2021 NEON films such as Spencer.

Cool, that design seems to be using similar packaging artwork to the screener box set NEON sent out- here's to hoping a second volume comes next year including The Worst Person in the World and (*holds breath*) Memoria

People who have the screener set have said that the one available for purchase is identical to the screener set, except without Memoria; I think they deliberately excluded it from the one available for purchase. Glad to see they're doubling down on their brilliant release strategy for this title...

[therewillbeblus]

Well there were 13 films on the screeners sent out, so my thought is since the omissions are films yet to have a U.S. theatrical release (including the Trier, which looks to be slated for an unfortunate Feb release- reminiscent of NEON's inexplicable Portrait of a Lady on Fire delay) there's a chance minds could be changed and bring Memoria into that box. I think we're expecting it in select Boston-area theatres sometime early next year..

[Matt]

This is the 99¢ rental of the week on iTunes (US) if you want to see it for cheap.

[domino harvey]

I didn't care for the first half at all but found the film quite resonant and moving once Lindon shows up.

What does it say about me that I preferred the first half?

I preferred the first half too, if just for how thoroughly tasteless and irredeemably violent and vile it was-- if you're going to go ahead and push the boundaries of good taste, push them all the way back like this! I found enough in the remainder of the film to keep me engaged, but it never quite reignites the (unsustainable, as someone else already accurately stated) mattress fire of a first act. Still, overall this movie gave me many, many new disturbing images I never asked for, and for that I think I'm thankful?

[tehthomas]

Now streaming on Hulu.
Will finally be able to check this one out.

[knives]

Senseabove summed this up for my fairly well. As a piece of aesthetic only the hair nipple and the second dance scene really engaged me and beyond that I felt it played with its many familiar tools without much depth nor confidence. It did leave me in the mood for one of its precedents. Which is to say I significantly preferred this to Raw. Hopefully the next one is an equal step up and I can join the celebrations.