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Agathe Rousselle in "Titane": An insane slaughter
Photo: Carole Bethuel / Cannes Film Festival
It's the end of a sweaty shift, two colleagues in the shower.
While you lather yourself, admiring glances slide down the naked body of the other.
Then a soap falls on the floor.
What is happening?
Because we're in a Julia Ducournau film, this one: The colleagues are young women who, as dancers at an underground fair for car fetishists, twist their lightly clad bodies.
As one of them bends for the soap, her hair gets caught in the other's pierced nipples.
Brief, futile nodding, then: pluck!
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Director Julia Ducournau: Without a doubt the wildest film of the year
Photo: Valery Hache / AFP
Anyone who survived Ducournau's debut film »Grave« about a cannibalist veterinary student five years ago halfway unscathed (allegedly faints at a screening in Toronto) will not be surprised at how the French woman goes to the full in her new film.
Nevertheless, she surprises with »Titane«, which has now made it into the competition in Cannes.
Because where she will take her imagination is not foreseeable, even after 108 shocking minutes of sex with cars, murders with hairpins and breasts filled with motor oil instead of breast milk.
Maybe even to the Golden Palm - if the jury around Spike Lee is willing to award the unquestionably wildest film of the year.
Metal in the head, kiss on the chassis
The story of Alexia (played as an adult by Agathe Rousselle, the discovery of this festival) begins with a childhood car accident. As a result of the accident, a metal plate made of titanium is implanted in her skull. Released from the hospital, Alexia does not look at her parents, but walks towards the car in which she crashed. A hearty hug, then a kiss on the side window, and it is clear that with Alexia closeness and desire work differently than with a lot of others.
But what exactly does "different" mean?
Even at the age of 30, when the film starts again after a big leap in time, Alexia doesn't know that yet.
Except that for her it's not one of these guys who admires her appearances at the auto shows and who confesses his love to her, even though they have never spoken to each other - that's for sure.
Pierce the ear with the long hairpin, painful death, idiot disposed of.
Should Alexia give a woman a try?
Ducournau tells so explicitly and concretely physically in her films that you can quickly forget how simple and, yes, empathic, her stories are because of all the writhing in the cinema.
»Grave« was a coming-of-age story that took the awakening carnal desires of its young protagonist extremely seriously - only translated into human carnal desires.
Rules no longer apply
»Titane« also turns the exploration of one's own sexuality into insane slaughter.
If the horror subgenre of gender gore does not yet exist, Ducournau invents it with this.
But what Alexia experiences can just as well stand for a generation of young people who have broken down their sexual identity and orientation in a completely new way and no longer recognizes any rules.
Ducournau only invents the split skulls, the rest is as truthful as radically compassionate cinema can be.
Is it a coincidence that the most impressive figures in this Cannes vintage are all not straight?
That the most beautiful female figure is the Finnish Laura from Juho Kuosmanen's »Compartment No.
6 «(competition) who has to break away from her painfully fleeting love for a Russian woman on a train ride?
Or that the most touching couple appears in the drama "Große Freiheit" (from the side series "Un certain regard"), which unfolds the brutal effects of Section 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense in Germany for almost a hundred years?
No, it only suggests that the festival has opened up a little more to the present.
In 2021 it will be very bloody - and dazzlingly good.