Titane review – Agathe Rousselle is extraordinary in Palme d’Or-winning body horror

Back in the mid-90s, David Cronenberg’s Crash – a film about auto-eroticism adapted from JG Ballard’s 1973 novel – became a scandalous Cannes festival cause celebre when jury president Francis Ford Coppola reportedly campaigned against it winning the Palme d’Or (instead, it received a “special jury prize”). Here in the UK, the Evening Standard labelled Crash “beyond the bounds of depravity”, while the Daily Mail called for a ban – a call answered within the hallowed borough of Westminster. How delicious, then, that a quarter of a century later, the French film-maker Julia Ducournau – who made a Cannes splash with her 2016 feature debut, Raw – should take the Palme d’Or with a film that owes a striking debt to Cronenberg’s body-horror back catalogue in general, and Crash in particular.

As with all full-blooded genre movies, there’s little mileage in describing Titane in terms of plot. Like Cronenberg’s The Brood, this is an adult fairytale (rated 18 for “strong violence, horror, sex”) about love, rage and loneliness, that operates on a visceral level, employing outlandish physical metaphors to describe down-to-earth emotional truths. Suffice to say that the story centres on Alexia (the remarkable Agathe Rousselle), a young woman with titanium plates in her head after a car accident as a child. It’s a trauma (her father’s fault?) to which she compulsively returns, earning a living as an exotic dancer at car shows, simulating erotic encounters with metal and glass.

There’s a car-crash quality to her relationships too – turbocharged encounters with men and women alike that breathe new meaning into the phrase la petite mort. Only a fantastical bump-and-grind with an automobile offers an emotional gear change, achieving the ecstatic highs that Alexia lacks elsewhere.

So far, so twisted. But after an orgy of carnage, Alexia needs to disappear. So she cuts her hair, breaks her nose, binds her breasts and strangely distended stomach, torches her home, and adopts the identity of Adrien, who disappeared as a young boy many years ago. There are narrative echoes of films such as Daniel Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) or Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008) in what follows, as bereaved fire chief Vincent (a transformative turn from Vincent Lindon) simply accepts this unspeaking stranger as his son, and insists that his colleagues do the same. “Anyone hurts you, I’ll kill ’em,” he tells “Adrien”. “Even if it’s me. I’d kill myself, I swear.”

Ducournau has described Titane as an attempt to talk about love without words, so it’s significant that dance plays an important role. From the commodified exhibition of Alexia’s car-show routine to the tragicomic sight of Vincent trying to win Adrien’s confidence by flailing around to the Zombies hit She’s Not There (title pun surely intended), movement and physicality speak volumes.

Indeed, for all its onscreen metamorphoses and extreme-cinema revelations, it’s the sight of Rousselle androgynously gyrating to Wayfaring Stranger that offers the film’s most startling moment – taking us right back to the opening scene, reminding us just how far we have travelled.

There’s a neat symmetry between the changing bodies of Alexia and Vincent, both of whom habitually gaze at their own reflections as they struggle to control their corporeal selves. While Alexia wraps her rebellious flesh in bandages, Vincent self-medicates with injections, raging against old age. Both inhabit bodies that refuse to behave; both have intense emotional needs they cannot contain.

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It’s easy to become dazzled by the headline-grabbing car-sex set pieces and Tetsuo-style flesh-and-metal mutations of Titane. Yet unlike Zoé Wittock’s 2020 gem Jumbo, for example, in which Noémie Merlant has a passionate relationship with a fairground ride, this is not a film about “mechanophilia”. On the contrary, it’s a fable that uses the lexicon of horror (serial killings, bodily eruptions, transposed identities) to get under the skin of unconditional love – just as Raw used cannibalism to discuss family bonds and coming-of-age traumas.

Some will be repelled, many will be bamboozled. But for those with an appetite for cinema that gets you in the gut, Ducournau delivers the goods, superbly aided by Raw cinematographer Ruben Impens’s glowing visuals, all underpinned by a soundscape that throbs and groans like a beating celluloid heart.