Titane

Directed by Julia Ducournau, Titane follows Agathe Rousselle’s Alexia as she goes on the run after committing a series of murders and eventually disguises herself as the long-missing son of a gruff firefighter (Vincent Lindon’s Vincent) – with complications ensuing after Alexia’s pregnancy, stemming from her steamy encounter with a car, becomes more and more difficult to disguise. Filmmaker Ducournau, working from her own screenplay, kicks Titane off with an off-putting and flat-out disastrous opening stretch that contains few, if any, elements designed to capture the viewer’s interest and attention, and it’s clear, certainly, that Ducournau’s weird-for-weirdness’-sake sensibilities essentially (and effectively) cancel out the picture’s admittedly cinematic visuals and a strong central performance by Rousselle. There’s little doubt, then, that Titane benefits from a comparatively conventional midsection that boasts a very small handful of agreeable, crowd-pleasing sequences, including a funny scene wherein Vincent instructs Alexia on how to perform CPR to the beat of the Macarena, although it’s worth noting that Ducournau’s relentlessly avant-garde approach threatens to alienate the viewer on a distressingly frequent basis (eg there’s an interlude set within a club that seems to go on forever). By the time the eye-rollingly oddball finale rolls around, Titane has cemented its place as a mostly underwhelming endeavor that does, at the very least, fare better than Ducournau’s nigh unwatchable Raw.

** out of ****