{"id":14584,"date":"2021-10-29T20:00:07","date_gmt":"2021-10-30T00:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=14584"},"modified":"2021-10-29T17:23:25","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T21:23:25","slug":"titane-2021-julia-ducournau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/14584","title":{"rendered":"Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before heading to the theater I checked the movie’s length on letterboxd, stopping to chuckle at their plot description about a fireman reuniting with his son, obviously a database glitch since everyone knows Titane<\/em> is about a woman having sex with cars. But it’s both! Agathe Rousselle, obsessed with metal and fire, is hiding from the cops after a serial-murder spree, having killed at least five hot young people plus her parents, and decides to masquerade as the missing boy on a poster. Now her adoptive dad wants to bond with her, while she’s trying to hide the evidence that she’s been knocked up by a hot rod.<\/p>\n

Movies do love to open with car crashes – good crash here, though I liked the Empty Man<\/a><\/em> kid’s coin-on-teeth routine more than Young Agathe’s vroom sounds. After Annette<\/a><\/em> and It Still Lives<\/a><\/em>, this is my third mutant baby (titanium-spined cyborg) in a couple months, and after Videodrome<\/a><\/em> and the Tsukamotos<\/a> this has become a flesh-machine-themed week. Raw<\/a><\/em> star Garance Marillier plays a friend\/victim, and is again named Justine. In Raw<\/em>, Justine’s sister was Alexia and her roommate was Adrien, and in Titane<\/em> those are the two names Agathe goes by – something’s going on here. Alexia’s real dad is Bertrand Bonello, and in her new life she’s got Claire Denis regular Vincent Lindon as a dad and Dardenne regular Myriem Akeddiou for a mom.<\/p>\n

The switch from car-humping icepick murderer to mute sullen teen firefighter is abrupt, but it works in the moment. Scott Tobias in The Reveal<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Its heroine’s body is stretched and mutated in Cronenberg fashion, and as she recedes ever more dramatically from social acceptability, Titane<\/em> stirs intense alienation and loneliness. But a disarming sweetness sneaks its way into the film, too, as the conventional boundaries of gender and family are scrubbed away and a relationship defines its own terms. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before heading to the theater I checked the movie’s length on letterboxd, stopping to chuckle at their plot description about a fireman reuniting with his son, obviously a database glitch since everyone knows Titane is about a woman having sex with cars. But it’s both! Agathe Rousselle, obsessed with metal and fire, is hiding from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2643,1676,2081,34,2740,1579],"class_list":["post-14584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2020s","tag-bertrand-bonello","tag-car-crash","tag-france","tag-julia-ducournau","tag-metal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14584"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14608,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14584\/revisions\/14608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}