Titane (2022)
JADE
I was resistant to this movie because I was anticipating a punk angry feminist revenge plot with plenty of body horror. This genre is basically unattractive to me because it doesn’t give me the wonder and bright-eyed ‘This world is so beautiful!’ effect I look for in art.
Instead of leaving me with a dead-eyed sensation that nothing means anything, this film was pleasing in another way: it illustrates these angry aesthetics and their underlying philosophies when taken to their logical conclusion. Alexia despises the masculine. Yet, in perhaps her most feminine look, as she performs her dance on the car in yellow fishnets and a gold matching set, she is brutally masculine, almost grotesquely so: her sexuality is completely non-sensual, so intensely outward and so intensely performative that there is no room at all for receptivity or feeling. She mimes fucking the car as if making love itself were a hateful, vengeful, singularly violent act.
ALEX
Her anger towards her father, her resentment towards the desperate men who support her career as an exotic dancer, and her insane pregnancy have all made her into a raging flame-monster. It’s appropriate for her savior in the second and third acts to be a firefighter.
I’m not sure what did it, maybe this is what good acting looks like? I knew from his first lines that the fireman was a trustworthy and honorable man. Every single character up to this point was tainted or doomed in some way, but a durable goodness is immediately radiating from this character.
Titane was an incredibly intense film for me to watch. I grew into adulthood, and manhood, raised by women who distrusted (or outright hated) men. I also harbored an unexpressed woman-within. This, combined with those values I inherited from the family, created an unconscious equivalent of Alexia’s grotesquely distorted masculinity. She mutilated her own face to escape conviction from murder, and I mutilated my own face by an unconscious resistance to being male, or to being physical at all. Now, because of the injuries that resulted, I have a plate of metal holding my jaw together, and a distinct love of internal combustion engines.
JADE
Yes, this movie has a uniquely Alex flare. Your love of combustion engines is an expression of your inner fire demon. This film is a friend of Mad Max in that way: it’s this picture of so much male intensity and machinery. But the body horror in this film uses that fire demon to destructive ends for the film’s first half.
ALEX
It ends up in a creative and good place with the climax of childbirth. But the intensity up to that point was continually intertwined with pain. To embrace a fire of the soul is meant primarily to be thrilling, ecstatic, huge as the ocean and as powerful as a volcano. Pain is present, but not the main theme. It’s tragic and relevant to today’s beliefs, that the truly huge experiences only come to these characters alongside great pain.
I have to conclude that this is a great film, even though it features the constant feeling and occasional reality of grotesque pain. Almost every shot is beautiful, every actor is up to the demands of the material, and the transformative element of Titane is, at the end of the day, love itself.
JADE
I’m glad we followed this film through to the end. It paints a valuable picture of our zeitgeist, painful as it may be. I’d recommend it to anyone who can stomach it.
ALEX
But not to those who can’t? I could barely stomach this film, yet I’m glad you pushed me to complete it. I felt tense and vulnerable in almost every minute: I could feel the pain of Alexia hiding her pregnancy, and I was frightened for the well-being of every innocent character the murderous protagonist met. I had to stop watching at intervals and do chin ups to work out the tension.
JADE
My past self definitely wouldn’t be able to stomach this film, probably couldn’t even sit through the first scene. During our screening today, I felt myself needing to focus. While you held your own head, tensely bearing the tortuous scenes, I found myself relaxing and breathing. The anticipation of body horror wasn’t quite so bad as seeing the mundane flavor of mortification of the flesh, which becomes tacky and stale once the initial shock wears off. It’s sad to see, sure, but ultimately I find less emotion in this deathly sphere, and far more emotion and inspiration in the celebration of life and the depiction of the human body as something desirable and fundamentally good.
ALEX
Cue a slow-moving tableau of beautiful shirtless firefighters.