![]() ![]() “The only thing I can tell you is that my parents always told me there is one case per patient, meaning you can’t treat two people the same. On any formative memories or anecdotes, though, she won’t be pressed. Ducournau’s parents were doctors her father was a dermatologist and her mother was a gynaecologist. On this subject, the filmmaker is willing to gift just one small detail of her personal life. She mostly uses medical references for such scenes. The more extravagant, the more organic it has to be in order to not have this distance that we have in the sci-fi genre in general.” That gap between what you’re seeing on screen and what you’re feeling (a phantom tug of the flesh, or sickening turn of the stomach) closes. Otherwise you’re not compelled to feel what they feel,” she says. I’m trying to erase the distance caused by the screen, that is caused by my film being fiction. “I’m trying to erase the distance between you and my characters. Together with her special effects supervisor Olivier Afonso, with whom Ducournau has worked since he concocted the prosthetic sheets of skin for Junior, they made it believable: the pulling, scratching, stabbing, tearing, leaking. We have to recognise ourselves to identify with these bodies.” “I always try to bring these moments back to our form of reality even though my film is not at all realistic,” says Ducournau, smacking her lips and lighting another cigarette. Or a helpful hand like the one Alexis extends Vincent when he is straining to inject steroids into his own arse. But it also has a tender, fleshy belly which it chooses to reveal at unexpected moments: within a euphoric whirl on the dance floor. Titane is a monster, a multi-fanged, many-limbed beast that does not so much crawl across genres as it does obliterate any in its path. “Obviously the context is different and the stakes are different, but they are all versions, mutations of the same person.” She breaks it down more simply: “If you had the multiverse, each film is a different universe that the character exists in.” Like an art house Marvel Cinematic Universe, though I don’t dare compare the two to Ducournau.ĭucournau hates when Titane is reduced solely to body horror. The names Alexia and Adrien also recur in Ducournau’s work, though played by different actors. Justine is an adolescent whose skin begins to shed like a snake. Look back further and you’ll find Marillier’s Titane character was born in Ducournau’s 2011 debut short Junior. Raw’s protagonist Justine – played by Garance Marillier, whom Ducournau has said is “like a little sister and my muse” – stars in Titane too. It’s natural, then, that the same names and actors appear across her oeuvre in multiple iterations. What they, and we as an audience, receive in return is a film like Titane, in which no punches are pulled. She also told Lindon – one of France’s most distinguished leads (and also a man in his sixties) – that he would have to commit to two years of weight training for his role as a kind-hearted, steroid-addicted firefighter. “It was really a lot of work,” Ducournau sighs. She learnt to fight and dance in the dojo. Rousselle learnt monologues from Twin Peaks, Killing Eve and Network. Over the next year, the two of them embarked on a crash-course: Acting 101. The fluidity of her look is something that appealed to me very much,” says the director.ĭucournau asked Rousselle to come back five or six times before giving her the part. With Ducournau, there is no eagerness to please – or pacify.ĭucournau and her casting director combed through Instagram and found Rousselle, a 33-year-old model with no film credits but a striking face that could transform in different light, at different angles. ![]() In conversation, she wears a bemused nonchalance that suggests very few things in this world have the ability to shock her. In her hand is a lit cigarette surrounded by a garland of chunky silver rings. She’s wearing a plain black Prada shirt, the brand’s small triangular logo emblazoned on her chest. Her face is illuminated, eerily so, by the white light of the screen in front of her. The 38-year-old filmmaker is speaking from a dark, nondescript room. “I think that shock value is something people remember more easily,” says Ducournau in a heavy French accent over Zoom. And pretty much as soon as the next scene starts to roll, the car sex becomes just one of many indelible moments. The moment in question – which does indeed see Ducournau’s protagonist writhe around nude inside a souped-up Cadillac while the automobile bounces vigorously of its own accord in mutual ecstasy – plays out in the film’s first 15 minutes. ![]() Bear in mind, most of those people have never seen Titane. That’s how some people have described Titane, Julia Ducournau’s second feature, which was awarded the top prize in Cannes this year. ![]()
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