Titane (Julia Ducournau)

"I'm here"

Amir Siadat

The structure of Titane is built on two parts. Both main characters have two halves. With the titanium in her head, Alexia has turned into a human-machine, related to metal, elusive of physical contact. Although Vincent has a godlike appearance in the eyes of the congregation under his command, inside he is a worn-out and suffering man. The former is representative of the usual fears of science-fictions about the future, and the latter one is the bearer of outdated values. The first part of the film, which belongs to the first one, is like a chaos. The seductive and fetishistic lusters of the cars and their entanglement with the mannequins in the ritual tracking shots of the exhibition section, represents the mythical nature of this ultra-modern theater and indicates its substantial relation with the witches’ feast in ancient courts and temples. In this part of the film, every human contact ends in killing, because the world is an arena of observation not contact, and it’s far away from sexual relation except with the car. In the second part, it is as if "Father" has come to restore order to the world again. If we can make a relationship between Alexia's destruction and fire (because of the flame motif on the car she dances on, or because of what she does to her father's house), Vincent's job is to Inhibit and extinguish the fire. And if no motivation and meaning can be found behind Alexia's killings, Vincent tirelessly tries to give meaning to his life. Julia Ducournau couldn’t find a better medium than the body to show the painful human condition. On the one hand, following the contemplation on male gazes in the opening exhibition, it reveals Alexia's deformed body and the neglected strains of this "object of pleasure", and on the other hand, by showing the declining body of Vincent, who has no other way than injection to show his daily empowerment (in the bathroom, where the predominance of pink color has given it a feminine spirit) conveys the decline of the father figure, who responds to violence with love and seems to be a statue of Christian morality. He probably knows that Alexia is not really his child, but he needs to love a human being in this badland, and be faithful to a truth. Titane is a call to return and restore the dignity of the broken father figure. Therefore, it’s not strange if in its moral path it summons the familiar elements of Christianity – even though imbued with the themes of the metal age - and, for example, letting a cyborg who has a baby from a car become the grotesque reflection of the virgin mother; a baby with patches of titanium on its body. the "Father" - who finally managed to revive human emotions in Alexia - assures this newborn baby that he is there to takes care of it.