| Title | The best Fast and Furious you'll see all week: Titane |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Movie reviews |
| When | November 1, 2021 |
When David Cronenberg adapted James Ballard's car crash fetish novel, Crash, he made a movie about a bunch of weirdos I couldn't possibly understand. Mainly because they seemed like nonsense ideas rather than actual people..
Directed by the same person that made Raw?
That’s all I needed. I’m off to watch it!
This is the movie that won the Palme D’Or this year.
And by “sex”, I don’t just mean the usual pensis and vaginas.
I got to get me one of those!
And tyvm @tomchick for such a wonderfully written review. You blend the themes and connect things incredibly well, the writing just flows, no awkwardness etc. Not my usual kind of movie (these days I tend towards largely brainless comedies, as I just want to relax when watching a movie, although I did watch, and enjoy, Dune) but I might actually watch this, on the base of your review alone, much like how I bought Champions of Hara because of you.
I watched Titane last week. It was the second part of a double feature with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Word of warning, this will be rambling and all over the place and I use a bunch of other films to compare parts of Titane to.
There is something incredibly enjoyable for me when I don’t know anything at all about the movie I am about to watch and everything will be a surprise to me. Tom mentions Under the Skin and that was another movie where, outside of the lead, I didn’t know anything else about it.
Titane wasn’t an easy movie for me to watch, in that way it was very much like Good Time by the Safdie brothers. It does reward you if you stick with it though. I particularly liked how Ducournau used humour when Alexia is on her date.
Speaking of Alexia, Agathe Rousselle’s performance was amazing I thought. Knowing now that she wasn’t a professional actor and was found on Instagram makes me think of The Florida Project and Bria Vinaite who was also discovered through a post on Instagram and was excellent in her film debut.
Watching Titane, I had to keep revising what I thought the movie was. At first I was like it’s this. And then 20 minutes in I’m all it’s this but it’s also this. And then it was also this, and also this. To me, that was similar to how I felt watching Sorry to Bother You.
It’s hard to talk about the movie without giving away specifics and you really shouldn’t know anything about the movie before watching it as I think that is where you will get maximum enjoyment.
This year I’ve only managed to watch 4 new movies I think. The Green Knight, Titane, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Nobody. If I had to rank them I think I would have it this way:
First: The Green Knight
Second: Titane
Third: Nobody
Fourth: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
It’s pretty weird and brutal, and as you can see, it’s not easy to figure out how to recommend without potentially ruining something. The Good Time comparison is apt. These are not kind movies.
Love your Florida Project recall! I recently watched a clunky but intriguing space Western with cute little Sophie Boutelle and the little girl who played Bria Vinaite’s daughter in Florida Project. I don’t recommend it, but Brooklyn Prince is great in it. It’s called The Settlers. I guess you can’t say Brooklyn Prince or Agathe Rouselle are non-actors anymore. You only ever get that label once. :)
Well, if you’re only going to watch four movies in a year, you could do worse!
-Tom
Oh my. I don’t know what I just watched, but I really, really liked it.
Having slept on it and read Tom’s review (and listened to She’s Not There a couple of times in a row) I’ve decided I love this movie, but I’m not sure I ever want to watch it again? But I also desperately need to hear someone talk about it in spoiler-filled detail. Is there a Patreon tier for a Tom Chick Titane commentary track?
I like that idea.
Chick Tracks does have a certain ring to it…
I have to wonder what a Titopsis would be like?
Upon further further reflection, I love this movie and need to see it again.
Well, I watched this. And, as sometimes happens, I feel like I saw a totally different movie than Tom.
In his (excellent) review, he talks a lot about car culture, and Fast and Furious movies. But that’s like… the first four minutes of the movie, at a car show. And then one brief, but pivotal scene where she has sex with a car which apparently impregnates her and one even briefer scene later where she has sex with a fire truck. But even those brief scenes don’t say “car culture” to me, or relate to Fast and Furious movies at all. To me, this movie has nothing at all to do with car culture, except to say that Titane (er, Alexia) comes from that world. But, I mean, she’s also a serial killer, which seems to be a more important part of her character than the fact that she dances at car shows?
The vast bulk of the movie is about her interaction with the firefighter character, and how he’s dealing with his loss. But I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to make of that either. I mean, given Alexia’s various character flaws, how does this even work? What does it mean? Why is this happening?
I was also somewhat discombobulated by the transition from the scene in the train station bathroom to everything that followed. It took me what was probably an unreasonably long time to work out that she’d turned herself in to the police and told them she was the missing boy. Which is an insane plan, but maybe one Alexia would come up with in desperation. I mean, it works, I guess? I just wonder why the filmmaker felt like that whole transition could be left out.
But then there’s the whole thing with her pregnancy, and I guess I just gotta spoiler this whole part. So, she’s been impregnated by a car, which can move of its own volition. Um. Is this a world where this happens? Or is she hallucinating? I kind of thought for the entire movie that she was hallucinating, because there are some scenes where she is clearly not pregnant (like where she dances on the fire engine). Yeah, she’s wrapping everything, but all that has to go somewhere, and in the fire engine scene it clearly isn’t anywhere. But at the end there’s a baby, which the firefighter sees, so…? I don’t understand what I’m being told here. Is it a metaphor for something? Is it all just for the body horror? I don’t understand.
I really felt like it was a jumble, what with the serial killer part, the pregnancy part and the firefighter part. I didn’t feel all those bits intergrated into a story.
I’ll agree with Tom that it’s a well-made movie with some great performances, as well as some really horrifying stuff. It’s definitely well above your standard Blumhouse schlock or what have you, but it didn’t stand out for me the way Raw did, for example.
Yeah I don’t think Titane has that much to do with the Fast and Furious movies or car culture except as a starting point to explore other subjects. Maybe @tomchick can elaborate on that.
Regarding the big spoiler paragraph (that I’m not sure needs to be a spoiler), she’s not hallucinating, and it’s not some fantasy world. It’s our world, but things can happen which are impossible in real life because, you know, fiction. Call it magical realism if that helps.
How it all fits together is open to personal interpretation, I’m not sure there is a single straightforward explanation we can point to. My understanding is that Alexia is detached and alienated from her parents and humanity in general, and so prefers the company of machines. The firefighter, by accepting her as whoever and whatever she presents herself, becomes a father figure and a human connection she never had until then.
So I probably didn’t make the point as well as I could have, but my Fast and Furious angle is mainly to avoid spoilers, but it’s also about how Ducournau approaches fetishism. To different degrees, Cronenberg’s Crash, Titane, and the Fast & Furious series are about fetishizing cars. But just as Raw isn’t about cannibalism, Titane isn’t about cars. Ducournau contextualizes fetishism, effectively reverse engineering it into a story about people instead of kinks. Cannibalism in Raw and car culture in Titane are central concepts for the characters, but not the audience or even the plot. In her movies, the fetishes give way to whatever point is being made about the characters (Alexia’s inhumanity in Titane and Justine’s (sexual) appetite in Raw).
But am I talking about Titane or a Fast & Furious movie if I list these elements:
car culture
family dynamics
the plot of an over-the-top villain
hilariously implausible intrigue
Because I think they’re central elements of both, even though Titane is an arguably inscrutable arthouse thriller and Fast & Furious is a massive and massively dumb international blockbuster.
But more importantly, the reason I wanted to invoke the Fast and Furious movies is because of their ridiculous insistence on being about family. It’s hollow to the point of being a joke. In fact, it is a joke. Adopt a Vin Diesel basso slur and say the word “Family”, or even just “Fam”. Everyone will know you’re talking Fast & Furious. Nothing onscreen bears any resemblance to an actual family, and certainly the behavior of the cast and crew does nothing to make me think they’re a family instead of just a clutch of bickering celebrities. Thematically speaking, as anything other than an excuse for intercut footage of cars and celebrities, the Fast and Furious movies are a goof.
But, hey, if you want a movie about family, boy have I got one for you! As you noted, Josh:
Both characters are members of a broken parent/child relationship. They take up with each other despite their differences. They become a family. That is the point of Titane more than anything else, and to say so in a review would be a massive spoiler. So I instead hit the Fast and Furious references as a fake-out. I tried to be similarly elliptical reviewing Raw without mentioning cannibalism. I’m not sure it works in either case, but I’m grateful to get a chance to explain myself. :)
As for one of the plot points:
I think there’s an issue with how the subtitles try to talk you through this, and I don’t think it quite works. But the idea is that Alexia sees the computer likeness in the train station of how the missing boy would look today. The poster (I believe it’s actually a computer screen) is translated in the subtitles without context, and at that point you have no idea why you’re seeing a poster for a missing child, because you don’t know that Alexia has just come up with an escape plan. So now she’s bashing her face on a bathroom sink and nothing makes sense yet.
Her scheme is obviously inspired by Frederic Bourdin, who posed as missing children come back years later to their grieving parents. It’s just the movie’s device for bringing together these two unlikely characters.
I feel like @ArtVandelay has the right of it:
-Tom