From the commodified exhibition of Alexia’s car-show routine to the tragicomic sight of Vincent trying to win Adrien’s confidence by flailing around to the Zombies hit She’s Not There (title pun surely intended), movement and physicality speak volumes. I’d kill myself, I swear.”ĭucournau has described Titane as an attempt to talk about love without words, so it’s significant that dance plays an important role. “Anyone hurts you, I’ll kill ’em,” he tells “Adrien”. There are narrative echoes of films such as Daniel Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) or Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008) in what follows, as bereaved fire chief Vincent (a transformative turn from Vincent Lindon) simply accepts this unspeaking stranger as his son, and insists that his colleagues do the same. So she cuts her hair, breaks her nose, binds her breasts and strangely distended stomach, torches her home, and adopts the identity of Adrien, who disappeared as a young boy many years ago. But after an orgy of carnage, Alexia needs to disappear. It’s a fable that uses the lexicon of horror to get under the skin of unconditional love Only a fantastical bump-and-grind with an automobile offers an emotional gear change, achieving the ecstatic highs that Alexia lacks elsewhere. There’s a car-crash quality to her relationships too – turbocharged encounters with men and women alike that breathe new meaning into the phrase la petite mort. It’s a trauma (her father’s fault?) to which she compulsively returns, earning a living as an exotic dancer at car shows, simulating erotic encounters with metal and glass. Suffice to say that the story centres on Alexia (the remarkable Agathe Rousselle), a young woman with titanium plates in her head after a car accident as a child.

Like Cronenberg’s The Brood, this is an adult fairytale (rated 18 for “strong violence, horror, sex”) about love, rage and loneliness, that operates on a visceral level, employing outlandish physical metaphors to describe down-to-earth emotional truths. How delicious, then, that a quarter of a century later, the French film-maker Julia Ducournau – who made a Cannes splash with her 2016 feature debut, Raw – should take the Palme d’Or with a film that owes a striking debt to Cronenberg’s body-horror back catalogue in general, and Crash in particular.Īs with all full-blooded genre movies, there’s little mileage in describing Titane in terms of plot. Here in the UK, the Evening Standard labelled Crash “beyond the bounds of depravity”, while the Daily Mail called for a ban – a call answered within the hallowed borough of Westminster. Back in the mid-90s, David Cronenberg’s Crash – a film about auto-eroticism adapted from JG Ballard’s 1973 novel – became a scandalous Cannes festival cause celebre when jury president Francis Ford Coppola reportedly campaigned against it winning the Palme d’Or (instead, it received a “special jury prize”).

Julia ducournau bio