Titane is an artfully grotesque, fluid, and profoundly human flick about a French (!!) car-shagging serial killer on the run. After suffering a car accident with her distant father, leading to a metal plate getting surgically stuck to her head as a child that made her sexually passionate about automobiles, now-wanted serial killer Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) burns down her family home and flees. With dead parents, two other new on-screen victims, and a mysterious pregnancy after sex with a station wagon, she finds an ad for digitally aged photos of kids who went missing, seeing one for a kid named Adrien, who disappeared 10 years prior. She breaks her nose and changes her appearance, turns herself in, and is taken into custody by the real Adrien’s father, defiantly aging fire chief Vincent (Vincent Lindon). While it becomes increasingly clear to Vincent’s station and ex-wife that this is not Adrien—or even a man—Vincent clings to the possibility of his son’s being alive through Alexia’s disguise, and Alexia conversely becomes dependent as her pregnancy becomes fatal and mysterious. The pair must learn to live again despite their bizarre extenuating circumstances, psyches, and dynamics in this mind-boggling thriller.

Titane is a psychotically intimate social analysis extrapolated from two fucked up individuals with the oddest sci-fi elements thrown in. All with typical French suave, cigarette drags, parties, and bleak outlooks. Nipples get nearly bitten off, stomachs rip open to engines breaking through, and murders are violently cruel. But for those looking for such French extremities, Titane is a boldly vivacious gaze at French blue-collar living and social norms.

A good example comes towards the film’s end, before the predictable fatal blow. A fire station party gets wild, with all the men and an Adrien-disguised Alexia flailing about drunkenly, to which Alexia is thrown on top of a firetruck and expected to dance for the crowd. As demonstrated in the film’s beginning, she’s a professional dancer for shady car shows and replicates those moves for the fire crew. They don’t understand; gazing, baffled, they question Alexia’s gender and/or sexuality without saying a word as she swivels her hips and feels her tits. While in context, this reinforces Vincent’s overall delusion—”Don’t ever talk about my son,” Vincent tells a fireman when mentioning Alexia’s real identity—these kinds of reactions apply to those about gay or trans people. Being either-or makes life a lot harder in working French regions. This sexuality provocation gets reinforced with both Vincent’s sub-arc with steroids, which he uses (and builds an immunity to) to keep young and healthy because to be a man is to be fit, and Titane‘s constant use of blue and pink lighting representing either the bisexual or trans flags. Without even touching upon the representations of Vincent’s and Alexia’s evolving relationship, Alexia’s industrialized pregnancy, or the personalities of these two people, Titane provides a boatload of fluid questions about identity vs. conformity.

If anything readable above turns you off, don’t watch this movie. Its vulgarity and privileged intellectualization of real issues keep it from being the pinnacle cinéma vérité of fictitious French drama. But for those at least tolerant of such scenery, Titane is a thought-provoking, insane trip through the minds of those experiencing bits of humanity’s worst traits and norms, leaving viewers equally baffled and satiated by its end.

Screens Friday, 1/10, 11:59 pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the ongoing repertory series: After Midnite