![]() Spike Lee, Jury members Tahar Rahim, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jessica Hausner and Mélanie Laurent on stage during the closing ceremony. ![]() It divided critics with vocal supporters and detractors, but the jury of Lee, fellow directors Mati Diop, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Jessica Hausner, actors Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Tahar Rahim and Song Kang-ho and singer-songwriter Mylène Farmer saw fit to award it top honors. “Titane” tells the story of a young woman who survives a car crash as a child and goes on to have a peculiar relationship with cars in adulthood. “Raw” director Ducournau returned to Cannes with her second film, her first in competition. The awkward atmosphere did not dissipate, however, with the typically garrulous Lee noticeably bashful. Gasps rang around the Grand Theatre Lumiere before the ceremony collected itself and reverted to the normal running order. In a shock moment, jury president Spike Lee announced the win in error early in the awards ceremony after a miscommunication. For the character of Alexia, the film’s winding journey is also explicitly about her “emancipation through monstrosity.French filmmaker Julia Ducournau has become only the second female director to win the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, for her film “Titane.” Titane also gets at intriguing ideas about gender and sexuality, similar to the director’s previous feature, the cannibal movie Raw. She comes at it violently, via the deaths of Alexia’s innocent victims-some of whom Ducournau makes us feel awful for, some of whom become unwitting comic relief. “She’s actually somehow reborn through this relationship that she has with Vincent,” Ducournau said of Alexia at NYFF, returning to the recurring theme of birth that courses throughout Titane. But in pretending to be Adrien, Alexia slowly learns how to open herself up to Vincent’s love, and the pair make the slow, treacherous emotional journey toward becoming a family of sorts. Even Adrien’s father, a tender, lonely firefighter named Vincent, falls for the ruse. After her kills make her notorious, she gives herself a twisted makeover and pretends to be Adrien, a boy who went missing years ago. In the beginning, Alexia is a vicious serial killer with a miserable home life. In order to get there, she had to start the story at a point bereft of love. ![]() That became the driving point for the plot of Titane, helping Ducournau crack the overriding theme of “the birth of love,” as she previously told V.F. It was jarring to her, but she was drawn to the contrast of the fantasy: birth and death, a cold, lifeless metal object merging with humanity. In an interview with Vanity Fair in August, Ducournau explained that she dreamed up Titane after having a recurring nightmare about giving birth to car parts. The movie’s ending was directly inspired by its origin. It actually becomes something very positive.” “A new humanity that is stronger because it’s monstrous. ![]() “I feel that my movie is pretty optimistic…it’s about the birth of a new world,” she said of Titane’s shocking conclusion. It culminates in a discomfiting, but eerily beautiful birthing scene in which Alexia’s father figure Vincent (a winning Vincent Lindon) helps deliver the child: a baby that is part human, part machine, with a titanium spine gleaming out of its back. She begins leaking inky black oil and her skin stretches apart, revealing the shiny chrome hidden in her belly. Over the course of the film-during which Alexia murders several people, then gives herself a twisted makeover so she can take on the identity of a missing boy in order to evade capture-her belly grows bigger and bigger. In her latest film, the Palme d’Or–winning genre thriller Titane-out in American theaters October 1-a woman named Alexia ( Agathe Rousselle) suffers a car accident that makes her sexually attracted to cars, resulting in an eerie, confounding pregnancy. Julia Ducournau is preoccupied with the tipping point where humans become monsters, morphing into something beyond the realm of either creature.
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