Paris (AFP)

La Croisette has passed its trash test: "Titane", a furious and sometimes gory film with French actor Vincent Lindon, based on woman / machine hybridization, love for cars and the quest for paternity, blew up the competing hemoglobin level.

The film was applauded for a long time after its screening on Tuesday evening at the Grand Théâtre Lumière.

This stirring feature film is signed Julia Ducournau, 37, the youngest of the 24 filmmakers in the running, with a smile as sweet as her film is violent. It opens with a car accident suffered by the main character, Alexia, in her childhood. Her father is driving, she almost dies and owes her survival only to a titanium plate that is inserted into her brain and which can be guessed above her ear.

We find her as a young adult, played by a beginner but bluffing actress, Agathe Rousselle.

The young girl literally makes love with cars, a tribute to "Crash" by David Cronenberg, and kills men, like Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct" but with a hair stick.

Her body is haunted by a mass of metal growing in her stomach as she sweats and bleeds motor oil.

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On the run after these murders, Agathe Rousselle, will meet Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a firefighter who, between two testosterone bites in the buttock, mourns his missing child.

He can offer her a refuge, she can repair her loss: on a "scorched earth", an "unconditional love" will be born, explains to AFP the director who readily plays with the virilist aesthetic of firefighters or tuning.

"One of my goals has always been to bring genre cinema or + UFO + films to general festivals to stop ostracizing a part of French production", adds Julia Ducournau.

"Gender also allows us to talk about the individual and very deeply about our fears and our desires."

- Quite wise -

The director had already left a memorable memory in Cannes with her first feature film, "Grave", a raw story of stripping of a student in veterinary medicine who becomes a cannibal, which allowed her to become the leader of a renewal of the tricolor genre film. Across the Atlantic, the director was dubbed by horror master Night Shyamalan, who commissioned her to direct two episodes of her "Servant" series and then said she had " all torn ".

While writing “Grave,” “I felt a lot of anger. Trump had just been elected, the world was not happy. I was very pessimistic about the future and about the society he was in. There was no room for fluidity, for transformation, for evolution and inclusiveness. At the time, it filled me with a kind of rage, "she said to AFP.

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In terms of thrills, the film awakens in any case a competition so far quite wise.

Some works have proven to be rock-inspired, such as Leos Carax's musical "Annette" which opened the competition, or "Petrov's Fever" by Russian Kirill Serebrennikov, but do not particularly play on "trash".

Paul Verhoeven's new film "Benedetta", the story of a lesbian nun in medieval Italy, arrived well with a sulphurous scent.

But if he was rather appreciated by critics, he did not create a shock either and the director of "Basic Instinct" and "She" is rather less disturbing than in his previous films.

It is ultimately perhaps by the yardstick of her compatriot Gaspard Noé that Julia Ducournau must be judged on the Cannes "trash-o-meter".

In 2002, the man who was to become the enfant terrible of French cinema, was also in his thirties presenting his second film, "Irréversible" in Competition.

A screening that the Palais des Festivals will never forget: about twenty people had been victims of fainting or nervous breakdowns, some evacuated and medically taken care of and more than 200 spectators had preferred to leave the room before the end.

Nothing like this during the screening of Ducournau's film.

And Gaspard Noé is also back in Cannes, but in calm mode, in the Cannes Première section, with a film on the decrepitude of an elderly couple.

© 2021 AFP