Titane (2021)

(Amazon Streaming, November 2022) Few things are funnier (or more pathetic) than a provocative film that meets the impassivity of a jaded reviewer. From the get-go (in which an exasperating kid causes a car crash that gets her a titanium plate in her head), Titane is custom-streamlined to shock the mundanes. Our protagonist is a loathsome young woman who kills for thrills, has sex with a car, falls pregnant (from the car, naturally), passes herself off for a long-lost kidnapping victim (unconvincingly cross-dressing as a young man while pregnant) and eventually seduces her new steroid-addled daddy. In the film’s climactic scene, she dies while giving birth to a human-car hybrid, because, obviously, this is where it was all going. (This is not a spoiler considering that the film does not run on plotting.)  No, it’s not meant to be a comedy… although the laughter of disbelief may bubble up now and then. Clearly, this is not meant to be taken at face value—you can feel writer-director Julia Ducournau poking at hot-button issues and cranking up the film’s shock factor in a quest to seek attention. It sort-of-works in that the film got a lot of coverage and more awards than you’d suspect existed. On the other hand, it’s depressingly mechanical in the way it goes about its business. Start with pregnancy body horror, and add as many shockers as you can—serial murders, abortion, bodily abuse, sexual fetichism—and wait until the audience cries uncle. Meanwhile, never mind if the plot falls apart at the slightest touch: having established that none of this is meant to be realistic, let commentators run wild at creating interpretations for the result. To be fair, the most interesting thing about Titane are the multiple long-winded essays explaining the film as being (pick as many as you’d like) parenthood; body dysphoria; trauma; loneliness; lust; and/or love. Or you can just roll your eyes at the games the film is playing and move on.