![]() How much do you want audiences to sympathize or identify with her as she’s going through everything else in the film? Regardless of everything else that happens to her, the character of Alexia is still a serial killer. For me, it’s really about playing with all the tools and all the codes that are at my disposal, in the spectrum of human psyche and human emotions, and try to somehow bend them all together. So I consider definitely myself as a genre filmmaker, but I would like to say genres, plural. I really like to play with all those codes and to disrupt them, divert them and intertwine them. And also obviously, I like emotions coming at the end of my film - real emotion that you don’t expect when you see the beginning of it. You can also have comedy emerging from a very horrific situation. Like all of a sudden you can have tension appearing from an apparently domestic situation or a strangeness appearing from the domestic situation and the reverse. I like to divert the codes of horror, to divert the expectations of the audience. Julia Ducournau: I use the grammar of body horror for sure. Do you consider yourself a genre filmmaker? I’m propelled into the future.’”Īlong with upscale festivals in Cannes, Toronto and New York, the film also is playing at audience-oriented genre festivals like Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest. ![]() And I was like, ‘OK, we’re not alone in that. So I thought about the third one, the fourth one, the fifth one. But me being the second one, it was impossible to say it’s an exception. we had to wait 28 years before the next one. “ could have felt like she was an exception,” said Ducournau of the only previous female Palme d’Or winner, who won for 1993’s “The Piano.” “And indeed unfortunately. “When asked me how I felt, I said, ‘It feels like history.’ And she laughed, with this very bright smile, and she said, “Honey, this is history.’ It felt good that she said that because I had the feeling that I was propelled into the future somehow. that felt way beyond me,” Ducournau said. “I remember there was something going through me. But she was still able to recognize the historic nature of her victory. ![]() Rather, she sought inspiration from painting and photography and draws formal and thematic connections to Sam Mendes’ 2019 movie “1917” and John McNaughton’s 1986 film “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.”Īt the Cannes awards ceremony this past summer, jury president Spike Lee accidentally announced “Titane” as the winner at the beginning of the event, and Ducournau spent the entire evening waiting for official confirmation. Many have compared “Titane” to David Cronenberg’s “Crash,” which caused a sensation at the 1996 Cannes festival for its own conflation of sex, violence and cars, but Ducournau says that wasn’t one of her primary influences. While Ducournau’s film is at times shocking and unnerving, the truest surprise of “Titane” is the tenderness that emerges between Alexia and Vincent, as the loneliness and isolation they have both felt for so long melts away, reforged as empathy and belonging. She assumes the identity of Adrien, the long-missing son of a firefighter, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), who is so overwhelmed at the return of his child that he overlooks any discrepancies, such as Alexia’s increasingly difficult-to-hide pregnancy. One night, when a fan gets forceful with her in a deserted parking lot, she embarks on a series of homicides and goes on the run. The film, now playing nationwide from Neon Films, follows the wild journey of Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a dancer at car shows who has a titanium plate in her head from a car accident when she was a child and a vivid scar to show for it. It took the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, becoming only the second film directed by a woman in the more than 70-year history of the festival to win the Palme d’Or. Her latest, “Titane,” is a hallucinatory journey to the heart of identity and the transformative power of love. The work of French filmmaker Julia Ducournau feels wholly singular, like a world unto itself.
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