Titane: My Mother The Car

Let’s consider the idea that a film is “about” something. This can mean different things. At one level, it’s the plot. At another, it’s ideas and themes addressed through the events of the film and the characters within it. Possibly even how the film is constructed. At another it’s what all of the above says about the time in which the film was made and the culture of which it is a product. Not every film engages at all of these levels, or at least not to the same degree. Sometimes a film about zombies chewing up reckless teenagers isn’t much more than that. Sometimes you know exactly what you’re getting. It’s about what it’s about, and exploration of anything deeper than that can sometimes be challenging.

Titane (Titanium) is “about” a lot of things, but whatever you think it’s going to be, you’re probably wrong. Delirious, evocative, and singular, it defies easy categorization and refuses to hew to expectations, genre or otherwise. And the result is excellent - harrowing, moving, uncomfortable and tender in equal parts.

We begin in a car, driving down a highway in France. There’s a little girl in the back seat humming, making engine noises with her mouth while her father drives. This irritates her father, so he turns up the radio. She hums louder. He turns up the radio more. She hums even louder. She starts kicking his seat. He endures all of it. And just as she’s unbuckled her seat belt and her father turns to make her put it back on, he has to swerve to avoid a car in the other lane, crashing into a concrete guardrail..

There’s surgery. The little girl (named Alexia) has a titanium plate inserted into her head at the site of a severe injury. It leaves her with a dramatic, looping scar outlining a hill of puckered flesh. When she finally leaves the hospital, she lets go of her mother’s hand and runs up to the family car, embracing it. Kissing it.

Years later, Alexia’s working as a dancer in what appears to be something between a car show and a fetish nightclub. Scantily-clad women writhe on and grind against various makes and models of cars, from sports cars to pickups to sedans with wild paint jobs. Men circulate throughout, looking, but not touching. The bouncers see to that. At the end of her shift, Alexia showers, changes, and walks back to her own car. A man waiting outside asks her for a selfie. Then for an autograph. She’s just trying to go home, and he keeps following her as she walks away. She walks faster and gets to her car before him. He apologizes, says he just wanted an autograph. Says that he is in love with her and even if she doesn’t feel the same way, maybe they could be friends. Says he wants to kiss her. Doesn't give her much say in the matter. He puts his hands on her head and pulls her toward him through her car window…

..and it ends badly. You get the sense that this isn’t the first time.

If you think you know where this is headed, you really don’t. There’s Alexia, her life with her parents, an unusual relationship with cars, and in the background, the news reels off the anniversaries of missing-persons cases and a recent rash of murders. We don’t get any explanation, just events that unfold and spill out with a sense of hasty improvisation, of someone making it up as they go along because their bridges are burning behind them. There’s not a lot of dialogue. Conversations are brief and mundane, but not meaningless or opaque. It’s a film that tells its story through action, rather than words, and we learn who these people are primarily through what they do, through a look or a pause. The result is a film that never feels predictable, that captures the moment where an already-unhappy life begins to go completely off the rails. Like a car in an uncontrollable skid - you know it’s going to come to a stop eventually, it’s just a matter of how ugly the crash is going to be when it does.

And it’s a hell of a ride. A big part of this film is the intersection of metal and flesh in contexts both mundane and bizarre. A frame is screwed into Alexia’s skull to keep her head steady, hair gets tangled up in body piercings, people jab themselves with hypodermics, metal and flesh come together in ways that are violent, ways that are sexual. Right alongside this is a very strong sense of the malleability of flesh (through surgery, piercing, medication, and violence, self-inflicted and otherwise) and just as the body is malleable, so is identity, so is gender, so are our relationships with each other. There isn’t so much a single thesis as a constant combination and recombination of these ideas in ways you wouldn’t expect.

But make no mistake, there is horror here. This is a very violent film, and the violence runs the gamut from the implied (one of the most chilling scenes in the film is one where someone just gets off a bus, but context is everything) to the blackly comic to the absolutely excruciating. With the malleability of flesh and its meeting with metal comes body horror as well, adjacent to films like Videodrome and Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and allusions to the vehicular fetishism of David Cronenberg’s Crash. But it’s as much about transformation as all of that as well - not just the body becoming something else (through means both commonplace and more exotic), but also people becoming other people, becoming the person someone else needs for us to be, in ways that aren’t always healthy. It’s what happens when - like Cronenberg so often did in his early films - you don’t so much set out to shatter those taboos as just sort of disregard them, and let differing ideas and experiences normally kept separate exist in the same space. The result is unsettling and surprisingly lyrical, as much about the humanity of relationships told through monstrosity (as in films like Spring and The Endless) as it is about inhumanity.

It's also visually striking in how all over the place it is. There are sequences saturated in purples or pinks or yellows, dingy spaces lit by harsh fluorescents, softly lit, slow-motion reveries, hard, overlit sequences drenched in lens flare, nighttime exteriors and the streetlights that provide a feeling of safety in unsafe places, fire and sunlight pouring through smoke, It’s all here in riotous, chameleonic fashion without ever feeling jarring or contrived. The music is equally mercurial, moving between pounding techno, synth-pop and old spirituals, especially working to underscore the complicated dynamics of gender, both rigid and fluid. All of it works together - the music, the cinematography, and striking imagery - to tell the story that the economical dialogue doesn’t exposit, and to present ideas for interrogation. What does it mean to have a body? What does it mean for metal to become part of the body? What does it mean to be male or female? What does it mean to be someone’s daughter? What does it mean to be someone’s son?

This is a film that defies easy explanation, is dreamlike and gritty by turns, and vividly evokes a world where barriers - between metal and flesh, between masculine and feminine, between family and strangers, all break down. It’s not every day that a horror film wins the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but I am completely unsurprised that this one did.

IMDB entry
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