#JULIA DUCOURNAU SERVANT SERIES#
Having spent this summer filming two episodes of the Apple TV+ series The New Look, starring Ben Mendelsohn as Christian Dior and Juliette Binoche as Coco Chanel, she is now gearing up to participate in France’s Villa Albertine artist residency program in New York.ĭeadline caught up with the director in the gardens of Marrakech’s Mamounia Hotel ahead of her In Conversation talk.ĭEADLINE: How have you been decompressing after your eventful 2021? But there's a slightly perfunctory feeling to the film's finale, and the way Alexia finishes up as less of an emotional being and more of a symbolic one, receding in the film's rear-view mirror.'Scarlet' Review: Pietro Marcello's Period Drama Is A Film Of Many Parts Perhaps that's unfair, given how far reaching Ducournau's scrutiny of gender, identity, family and parenthood is. Too soon, it seems, given how many ideas feel undercooked. The misstep reinvigorates the film's curiosity about the nature of gender identity.īut the pressing issue of Alexia's mechanical womb, Ducournau's most obvious body horror idea, is what drags the drama to its watershed finale. The question's urgency waxes and wanes with the film's uneven pacing, but there are moments when the conceit finds its friction point.ĭuring an all-male office disco, for example, Alexia's muscle memory betrays her and she busts out some old dance moves atop a fire engine, sending jaws to the floor. The building is both haven and prison – a concrete box with a pink tiled bathroom and family meals cooked for two.ĭoes Alexia have the stamina for this unrelenting performance of domesticity and duty? In contrast to the freedom of the film's first half – where she strides through the world confident in her ability to dominate others physically and emotionally – the second half of the film becomes a cloistered drama. The body – once her weapon - becomes her enemy.
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We get tormented scenes in mirrors where she's strapping down her breasts and picking away at the skin from her bulging belly. Meanwhile, Alexia becomes a prisoner in her own web of deceit and denial. He can't stop the advance of time, but he tries all the same, and yells his frustration when his body gives out during exercise routines. She photographs his muscular body naked, revealing his sagging buttocks covered in small bruises where he injects himself daily with steroids. It's a charade, but no one seems game to tell Vincent.ĭucournau is sympathetic to his loneliness, exacerbated by the solitude of his rank and the age gap between him and his men.
In the narrative haze between realism and fantasy, Lindon's masterfully shaded performance lends credibility to the desperate scenario, allowing Ducournau to steer her film away from its early focus on sexual desire, towards a multifaceted exploration of identity and belonging.Īlexia ends up living at the station - a compound where a dozen or so men live under Vincent's command - and she's issued with a fireman's uniform and hat.
Bouncers warn the mostly male punters that they can look but they can't touch, but it's not enough to dissuade one pest, who lives to regret it.Īs vicious as it is, the gory encounter inspires qualified sympathy for Alexia as a woman reacting to a sexual assault but a bloodier scene later in the film is harder to watch.Īfter a steamy date turns sour, she slashes and pummels her way through the occupants of a share house – unprovoked and without real justification - while Ducournau doubles down with the ironic soundtrack choice of Italian pop singer Caterina Caselli's 60s hit Nessuno mi può giudicare ('No one can judge me'). It occurs at an auto show where the camera picks her out in a crowded convention hall gyrating suggestively on the bonnet of a car to pounding music. The first murder we see Alexia commit is deceptively straightforward, like an act of vengeance in a rape-revenge movie. Titane is a much more complex film – and more ambitious - moving on from the concerns of young adulthood to the anxieties of parenthood and family, while parsing themes of gender and body transformation. It was also an improbably delicate and surprisingly insightful coming of age story. Ducournau's impressive 2007 debut, Raw, dealt with similar themes, depicting a young vegetarian who discovers insatiable cannibal appetites.
Perhaps not since Claire Denis's 2001 vampire allegory Trouble Every Day has a director been so invested in the perspective of a female predator, and so resistant to easy psychological explanations.
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