Julia Ducournau (Paris, 1983) is to the golden palm what was up for a long time to be Damien Hirst to the Turner Award of Art.
The impact that produced among those accustomed or not so much to the great extravagance ‘Mother and Child, Divided’ (literally a cow and its calf parties in half and submerged in a formaldehyde pool) was in 1995, Grade above or down, similar
Al provoked by ‘Titane’ in the last edition of the Cannes Film Festival.
‘Titane’ is basically a film that exploits.
Or currently.
For the most skeptics, all the right to go through a collection of provocations so happily disordered that there is no other, in spite of everything, to surrender.
For the rest, including the jury chaired by Spike Lee, it is simply the feeling of the year, of a carnal genius and very bloody label free.
“Sincerely, I relate better with the verb causing that with the noun provocation. It is an obligation of art to create debate, force to think and take a party. I am aware that what I do cause as many adhesions as rejection, but that is about it:
Do not leave anyone indifferent. Abomino the provocation, but all my desire is to provoke, “confesses as a prologue the director who after making the croisette jumped through the air, approached San Sebastián to follow his explosive journey.
But what is seen in ‘Titane’ that we have not seen before? Basically, the story of a woman is told without another identity that her will of being someone who is not, to abandon everything she was and give birth to a invulnerable being. Steel even. In the first scene, a girl has an accident and is operated on her head. She is implanted by a titanium plaque. Then, the Hypnotic Gesture Actress Agathe Rousselle dances in a tugurium, kills, Fornica with a truck (is not metaphor), stays pregnant from the vehicle (it is not metaphor either), it murdered, flees, is disguised as man, It passes through the lost son decades ago (Harvest Vincent Lindon) and, finally, discovers something similar to peace. “The paradox,” explains with enthusiasm the director, “is that the more she moves away from the being of her as a human being, she approaches an authentic humanity.” She takes a second and follows: “New? Of course not. I have already seen it in ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley. It is the same story, but completely different.”
Be that as it is, if something can not be accused of Ducournau is incoherent. From the first short film, the obsession of him by the body, the flesh, the transformation and the identity (all in one) has chaired each of the frames of him. “I imagine that something has influenced the one that my parents were the two doctors,” she points out funny and almost as part of ‘Show’. ‘Junior’, her first job, told how a girl moved the skin after poisoning. And she had it crude. And ‘raw’, his 2016 film with which she placed on the radar of all festivals, was directly an apology of meat, indeed, raw. The story of a teenager who uncovered the secret of the family hidden in the taste at all disguised by the blood was transformed before the surprise (and a little the vomiting) of the viewer in an irrebate metaphor of puberty. Then he liked to say: “In every movie we see, women have to be beautiful and be in shape or whatever, and they have to fit into a given box. And no: Women throw pedboles, dig, they make peep, Erucan. That’s why you can identify with them, because they are not these heavenly creatures, but real people with real feelings. ” Any questions?
And then ‘Titane’ arrived.
“I am aware that the question of identity has become an issue that crosses a good part of the necessary changes for a just society, deciding who you are without impositions is an argument that crosses any battle for emancipation and, of course, the
Freedom. Although I do not move a political intention … I dream of a society in which the genre is completely irrelevant … and that is in my cinema, “he says to get doubts about the reason for the obstinacy with which his characters
They mutilate, hit and, do not doubt it, there is a lot of damage.
And she adds: “I go back to Shelley. The change does not take you away from who you are but that you bring you who you want to be, to your true humanity.”
It is clear.
If you are asked about David Cronenberg, before the questioner is over, she released a laugh.
“Cronenberg, always him,” she says.
“Of course it has influenced me, I remember that I discovered its cinema almost a secret and it was an authentic revelation, I felt very close to it because I felt like him. Where the others see something horrible, I only see beauty, that was happening
His films and I want to believe that in general. I also remember the first time I saw ‘Crash’ [the 1996 Cronenberg Ribbon]. It caused me a great rejection and little by little I was discovering it and transforming a little about it. I would love it
Provoke (again the verb) the same in my audience, “he explains, stops again and concludes:” But I sincerely feel the same or closer to Fellini, Pasolini or photographer Robert Mapplethorpe than Cronenberg. ”
Perfectly, like a cow and its calf parties in half.
