OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Rising hot liquid. Adrenaline rush. Rise of milk. With Titanium, Julia Decournau signs a genre and transgender film in three tableaux, which her character of mutant warrior, Alexia / Adrien (Agathe Rousselle), crosses as one flees the flames of the fire, to save his skin, at least this which remains of a shattered life since childhood. In competition at Cannes, this second feature film, which hits theaters on Wednesday July 14, confirms the immense talent of the director, born in 1983, after the shock caused by her first “feature”, Serious, on a medical student (Garance Marillier) tempted by anthropophagy. Julia Ducournau is once again working on the question of the flesh, from another perspective, more philosophical, connected to changes in the body and to filiation.
After a violent car accident with her father (Bertrand Bonello), Alexia survives thanks to a prosthesis embedded above the ear, containing titanium – a metal resistant to high temperatures. We discover this androgynous beauty in a motor show with a Lynchian atmosphere, where the sexual fantasy is in full swing – long before the #metoo era, a car ad hadn’t dared this slogan, “He has the car, he will have the woman” ? Here is a hood carefully washed by a pair of sparkling breasts and, a few sedans later, Agathe in fishnet declaring her love for a Buick, the camera as close as possible to her loins.
Let’s not scream too quickly, Julia Decournau pushes the clichés to the extreme to immediately deflate them
Let’s not scream too quickly, Julia Decournau pushes the clichés to the extreme – we think of girls “well bodied” – to deflate them immediately. There are not on the one hand the victims, on the other the profiteers. Erotic performance is a job, and girls are not easy prey. Alexia liquidates a “client” who gets too close. Love is A Dog from Hell (“Love is a dog from hell”), is it tattooed on his chest.
Her thing in Alexia is the car. Fasten your seatbelts, in Titanium, these unglamorous accessories are rediscovered sex appeal. The first murder triggers new ones, the killings become joyful and savage as in the final bouquet of Parasite (2019), by Bong Joon-ho. Wanted by the police, Alexia runs away and turns into a boy, reshaping his face like a sculptor would with a chisel… Seeing him, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a firefighter by profession, thinks he has found his missing son there. is ten years old, and Alexia becomes Adrien.
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