Criticism 'Titane', a phenomenon has been born in Cannes ... and it gives cramp
Cannes Film Festival 'Titane' makes the Palme d'Or explode with justice and great pleasure
Julia Ducournau (Paris, 1983)
is to the Palme d'Or what Damien Hirst could have been to the Turner Prize for art. The impact it produced among those used or not so used to the genius extravaganza
'Mother and Child, Divided'
(literally a cow and her calf split in half and submerged in a pool of formaldehyde) was in 1995, grade up or down, similar to the one caused by '
Titane
' in the last edition of the Cannes Film Festival. 'Titane' is basically an exploding movie. Or give current. For the most skeptical, he has every right to go through a collection of provocations so happily disordered that there is no other, in spite of everything, but to surrender. For the rest, including the jury chaired by
Spike Lee,
it is simply the sensation of the year, a carnal genius and very bloody free of labels.
"Honestly, I relate better with the verb provoke than with the noun provocation. It is the duty of art to create debate, force to think and take sides. I am aware that what I do causes as many adhesions as rejection, but that is what it is about: not leave anyone indifferent. I
abhor provocation, but all my desire is to provoke ",
the director confesses by way of a prologue, who after making the Croisette explode, she approached San Sebastián to continue her explosive journey.
Director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau. Jeff Spicer
But what do you see in '
Titane
' that we haven't seen before? Basically, it tells the story of a woman with no other identity than her will to be someone she is not, to abandon everything she was and to give birth to an invulnerable being. Steel even. In the first scene, a girl has an accident and has an operation on her head. A titanium plate is implanted. Then, the actress with a hypnotic gesture
Agathe Rousselle
dances in a slum, kills, fornicates with a truck (it is not a metaphor), she becomes pregnant with the vehicle (it is not a metaphor either), she kills again, runs away, disguises herself as a man, Posing as the decades-lost son of a firefighter (hulking
Vincent Lindon)
and, finally, discover something like peace. "The paradox", the director enthusiastically explains, "is that
the further you move away from your being as a human being, the closer you get to an authentic humanity
.
"
It takes a second and continues: "Of course not new as we have seen in '?.
Frankenstein
' by
Mary Shelley
's the same story, but completely different.".
Be that as it may, if Ducournau cannot be accused of something, it is incoherent. Since his first short film, his obsession with the body, the flesh, the transformation and the identity (all in one) has dominated each of his frames.
"I imagine that something has influenced the fact that my parents were both doctors," she
points out with amusement and almost as part of the '
show
'. '
Junior
', her first job, told how a girl shed her skin after getting intoxicated. And he told it raw. And 'Crudo', his 2016 film with which he was placed on the radar of all festivals, was directly an apology for meat, in effect, raw. The story of a teenage girl who suddenly discovered the family's secret hidden in the taste not hidden by blood was transformed to the surprise (and a little vomit) of the spectator into an irrefutable metaphor of puberty. Then he liked to say, "In every movie we see, women have to be pretty and fit or whatever, and they have to fit into a certain box.
And no: women fart, shit, pee, they burp.
That is why you can identify with them, because they are not these heavenly creatures, but real people with real feelings. "Any questions?
And then '
Titane
' came along. "I am aware that the question of identity has become an issue that goes through a good part of the changes necessary for a just society. Deciding who you are without impositions is an argument that goes through any battle for emancipation and, of course, the Freedom. Even if I am not moved by a political intention ... I
dream of a society in which gender is completely irrelevant ...
And that is in my cinema, "he comments to remove doubts about the reason for the stubbornness with which his characters they mutilate themselves, they beat each other and, make no mistake about it, they do themselves a lot of damage. And he adds: "I go back to Shelley. The change does not take you away from who you are but it brings you closer to who you want to be, to your true humanity." It is clear.
If asked about David Cronenberg, before the interviewer finishes the question, she laughs. "Cronenberg, always him," he says. "Of course it has influenced me. I remember that I discovered his cinema almost in secret and it was a real revelation. I felt very close to him because I felt like him.
Where others see something horrible, I only see beauty.
That happened to me by watching his movies and I want to believe that in general. I also remember the first time I saw '
Crash
'[Cronenberg's 1996 tape].
It produced a great rejection in me and little by little I was discovering it and transforming myself a little into it.
I would love to provoke (the verb again) the same in my audience ", he explains, stops again and concludes:" But honestly I feel the same or closer to Fellini, Pasolini or the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe than to Cronenberg ".
And how does it feel to be the second woman with Palme d'Or? Much better than if you were the first.
In my case I do not feel like an exception.
And that is important.
I imagine that if you are the only one you are a bit like a monster and that is precisely what is inhuman.
I don't know if I can explain myself?
Perfectly, like a cow and her calf split in half.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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