On Titane and The Mad Women’s Ball
At the beginning of Raw (2016), French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s terrific feature-length debut, a pool-eyed teenage girl started her first semester of veterinary school. There, she uncovered, to her chagrin, not a renewed passion for helping animals but a sudden, overpowering craving for human flesh — a hunger she could ignore for so long. Ducournau carries over much of Raw in her long-awaited, Palme D’Or-winning follow-up, Titane. There are the twinned character names: both Raw and Titane concern themselves with people named Adrien, Alexia, and Justine. There’s also a similar preoccupation with a progressively out-of-control character whose innate desires are entwined with the destruction of others and continuous self-jeopardization as a result of them.
Like all good body horror movies, Raw and Titane are compelling, if not always easy to watch, nightmares in which the human form undergoes scarily unrecognizable change evocatively. Their “weaknesses,” perhaps — and not unlike the weaknesses seen in movies made by obvious Ducournau influences David Cronenberg and Claire Denis — is that they aren’t films that do much for you emotionally. You still feel cold and queasy when something close to “moving” or “touching” breaks through the shock-inclined narrative. Most of one’s enjoyment of Ducournau’s movies thus far, then, comes from a morbid fascination around where, exactly, this clearly in-control filmmaker is going to guide you. You wouldn’t think to watch passively.
Though it’s hard to top, boundary pushing-wise, a movie about a girl’s coming of age as a cannibal, Titane has no problem upping the extremity ante of its predecessor. It’d be a mistake to go into too much detail about all that happens in it; the first stretch of the movie is a feat of one-shock-after-another directing that should be experienced without knowing too many particulars. What I will say is that Titane follows a young woman named Alexia (an exceptional Agathe Rousselle, a model making her feature debut) who, as a little girl, was in a serious car accident with her father that left her with a titanium plate fitted to her skull.
She already seemed resentful of her parents pre-crash: the accident happened in the first place because Alexia was aggressively kicking her dad’s seat, loudly imitating the sounds of an engine roar to annoy him, and unbuckling her seatbelt at a particularly inopportune time. But when she gets out of surgery, she greets Mom and Dad with presumably even over-the-top-for-her death glares — like they’re strangers getting in her face — but the car outside like a long-unseen grandmother asking with a smile for a hug. Is she performing a strange kind of family feuding, or has the surgery inflamed something else in her?
When the movie skips ahead to an adult Alexia, the latter seems truer. She’s now confirmed to be plagued with two seemingly unstoppable impulses that do not bode well for someone wanting to live conventionally. A burning desire to kill people; an inexplicable sexual attraction to cars. Alexia’s able to sate the latter hankering for the most part by working as a showgirl at a car show, where all she does all evening is writhe around and on top of spruced-up muscle vehicles, like their hoods were laps. But it hasn’t been so easy to slake her homicidal impulses. At the beginning of the movie, Alexia stabs in the ear canal with a hairpin (much like the femme-fatale villainess of Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador, from 1986) an obsessed fan who follows her to her car after a show one night, unflinchingly, maybe even happily, holding her weapon tightly in place until her victim’s eruption of reactive spittle subsides. When we hear reports emanating from a TV screen the morning afterward that a serial killer has apparently descended on the area in recent months, it’s plenty clear who the culprit probably is.
Titane encompasses where Alexia’s breathtakingly impulsive decision-making and progressively out-of-bounds bloodlust get her. One centerpiece involves her ending a late-night hookup with a love interest (Garance Marillier, of Raw) by attacking her and her housemates, doing stuff with dining-room chairs and fire pokers I’d maybe like to unsee. The longest stretch of the movie finds Alexia ingratiating herself in the life of a manly-man fire-and-rescue captain (Vincent Lindon) still mourning the decades-old disappearance of his young son; he obsessively staves off the aging process by injecting himself with steroids, maybe in part to rid himself of any visual reminders of how the toll of losing his child has manifested physically.
This ingratiation is problematic, to say the least, because it involves Alexia disguising herself as a man while trying to — get a load of this — conceal a fast-growing pregnancy that is the result of her figuring out a way to fuck her favorite show car at the start of the movie. (Ducournau isn’t at all circumspect about what’s going on: shortly after she notices her newly pooched-out stomach, Alexia begins to lactate oil, and when she tries aborting the baby herself with her prized murder weapon-slash-hair accessory in the bathroom, we swear we faintly notice the sort of tinny sound you’d hear if you poked a frying pan with a fork.)
I wouldn’t say Titane totally comes together. The extended time spent with the firefighter — interrupted sometimes by mesmerizing, stylized sequences admiring the impressive bodies of his young-buck employees as they’re saving lives, escaping in dance-heavy staff parties (Titane always treats the body like a piece of meat vulnerable to all kinds of gazes) — after a certain point loses the magnetic-to-watch chaotic energy of the first part of the movie. And the storyline holistically doesn’t completely gel. The serial-killing stuff feels more and more like an added detail not-all-that-necessarily seasoning Ducournau’s otherwise intriguing depictions of transformation, and the difficult-to-contend-with futility of always getting your body to behave the way you’d like it to — or the way society’d like it to — on an of course singularly exaggerated level. Ducournau is working hard to push us around. Your mileage may vary on how much you take to the movie’s wall-to-wall provocation, augmented by unyieldingly flashy visuals — themselves pleasurable to simply experience — that easily segue from neon dreaminess to the austere.
But I found Titane’s relentlessness, determination to risk-take, in themselves virtues. You’ll probably be left breathless, even if you don’t like the movie, fundamentally because of Ducournau’s thrilling dismissal of ever letting us get settled, swaddle ourselves in an imagined comfort of thinking we’ve accurately predicted where it’s going to go next. I wonder where Ducournau is going to go next, too. What’s clear so far into her brief career is that even if she isn’t yet as satisfying a dramatist as an electrifyingly vigorous provocateur and galvanizing thinker, she’s the kind of filmmaker who takes you places you’ve never been never assuming you can’t handle it, who maybe wants you to push back more than love everything she has to offer. She wants us to have as good a time (maybe “good” isn’t the right descriptor; maybe a basic “interesting” is more sufficient) discovering new cinematic territory as she ostensibly is making her films. You watch Titane with the sense that she’s only going to get better and better, and more daring.
ACTRESS TURNED FILMMAKER Mélanie Laurent’s fifth feature-directing effort, The Mad Women’s Ball (Amazon Prime), is set in 19th-century France. It’s a quasi-horror movie about a gifted, forward-looking young woman (a terrific Lou de Laâge) whose open disdain for women’s designated societal roles, curiosity about the world, and — more abstrusely — apparent clairvoyance lands her in an asylum at the behest of her stern, high-society father (Cédric Khan). Eugéne (the young woman) is suffering from “hysteria” — a deeply misguided “condition” that wouldn’t be taken out of the DSM for another century — to his eye. He wants her to be “cured” (i.e., made docile) so that the family name won’t be undermined by a daughter who just wants to have the same freedoms as the younger brother, Théophile (Benjamin Voisin), she’s so close with. (The brother also poses potential for reputation-soiling, unbeknownst to this domineering patriarch: Théophile is gay, a secret his sister accidentally discovers one night but keeps to herself.)
Co-writing with Christophe Deslandes, Laurent empathetically chronicles Eugéne’s humiliating experiences at the hospital — freezing-cold baths designed to “shock” out madness, unbearable bouts in solitary confinement — while also using them to more widely consider the horror imposed so often on “disobedient” women of the era. Some people at the asylum genuinely need care (though how many have been driven to certain states by the asylum and its conditions is arguable). But most others have been unceremoniously slung there by families that consider them too big a threat to their social standing. One woman Eugéne befriends (Lomane de Dietrich) simply told a family member she’d been raped by a mutual relative; another (Lauréna Thellier) had previously made a living pickpocketing.
Laurent and Deslandes aren’t subtle about the ghastliness of the era’s medical sexism (which has all but evolved and mutated for today) and how so much of “treatment” was more than anything masochistic, based on slipshod theory. The supposed genius of the asylum’s chief neurologist, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (Grégoire Bonnet), who isn’t fictional, is correctly framed as little more than constant abuses of power gone unchecked both because of his stature and because of the few rights possessed by those on whom he was testing. Throughout The Mad Women’s Ball, you can concurrently feel Laurent and her collaborators mourning for the broader things its patients, and women society-wide, were robbed of. The countless dreams gone unrealized, knowledge made inaccessible, travels never experienced, all on account of patriarchal dominance — a mass tragedy of unnecessarily stolen fulfillment. Laurent conspicuously has real affection for even her most-minor characters: even those with very limited dialogue are given enough to say to help us imagine fuller pictures of what it is they have endured, lost.
The Mad Women’s Ball’s dramatic thrust mostly comes from the friendship that slowly forms between Eugéne and the asylum’s head nurse, Geneviève (Laurent). The latter is at first framed as just another callous cog in a machine; many viewers might immediately think of her the way they might Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). But as we get better familiar with the character, it becomes clear that Geneviève, while nonetheless complicit in a twisted system, sincerely wants to help people, but as a woman can at most get a decently high-ranking role in a hospital that still has to answer to male rule. She and Eugéne begin to bond around the time it’s proven that the latter really does have the psychic powers she claims. Eugéne makes contact with Geneviève’s late sister’s spirit, then later “sees” Geneviève’s father, whom she lives with, having a medical emergency in the kitchen. (When Geneviève immediately flees work to check on him, he’s struggling to recover from the incident in his bedroom.)
Geneviève can also see, after reading in one sitting a book guilt-ridden Théophile drops off to give to his sister — Allan Kardec’s The Spirits Book (1857) — that she and her patient have far more in common than she’d originally realized. As a director, Laurent pretty effortlessly derives suspense from the bind Geneviève increasingly finds herself snared in. She knows that Eugéne isn’t “crazy,” but to say how she knows this for sure — for one thing, that her clairvoyance isn’t mistaken — could very well put her in the shoes of one of the women she cares for every day.
I haven’t seen Laurent’s other directing efforts. But on its own terms, The Mad Women’s Ball makes a case for her being as incisive a filmmaker as an actress, clearly acutely aware that psychological, emotional, and visual detail shouldn’t be prioritized over one another but rather working in careful tandem in a movie that’s so multifactedly horrific. The film can sometimes feel a little facile in how it presents this story: the drama feels most of all in service to the perceptive and critical ideas invoked rather than the other way around. Still, The Mad Women’s Ball is nevertheless an oftentimes searing and unwaveringly riveting horror movie obviously conscious of how, although the genre often tends to cull terror from the imagined, there’s a well of awful history to pull from that can have just as profoundly unsettling an effect when dramatized as opposed to once again highlighting run-of-the-mill ghosts and ghouls causing trouble. You can simply walk away from a haunted house. You can’t so easily escape a society that won’t flinch as it terrorizes you into submission.
Peterson Reviews 