Best Films of 2021: Titane
This is an article I wrote for the University of Exeter’s student newspaper, Exeposé, and appeared in its print edition.
Julia Ducournau’s sophomore effort is a conflicting film inasmuch as it pits heart against mind, and perhaps against stomach too. Titane is extreme cinema with just so much heart, dead set on stirring the pot yet lacking the smug contrarianism to which so many of its peers seem attached. This may prevent it from being the most universal experience released over the past year, but that doesn’t stop it from being the boldest and most emotionally raw.
It’s a film that deals in the visceral, ugly consequences of the ideas it’s interrogating, forcing relatively well-trod metaphors such as the notion of found family, the blurring of bodily boundaries, and terror of aging into the blinding daylight of a fleshy, embodied world. Though every performance (Agathe Rousselle is utterly vicious, here), frame, and narrative beat betrays real confidence and talent, there’s also something risky and slightly on edge about it all. Since the acclaim her debut, Raw, drew, Ducournau has refused to rest on her laurels, demonstrating an entirely authentic commitment to her work.