Why Titane, Julia Ducournau’s 2021 Cannes Palme d’Or winner, may be the most extreme movie you’ll see all year

“I really wanted to try to make you feel love,” French director Julia Ducournau says as she explains the motivations behind her wild new film Titane. “My main goal was to make you feel physically what my characters are undergoing. I thought it is very difficult to make you feel love, without making it something intellectual that you analyse. I thought that was a good challenge to see if I was able to do it.”

No, Ducournau is not France’s equivalent to Richard Curtis, the British filmmaker behind such romcom classics as Love Actually and Notting Hill. Her razor-edged brand of cinema is a mite more extreme: bloodshed, body horror and black comedy all whisked into an unbelievably shocking soufflé (though she does surprisingly exclaim “I love Richard Curtis!” at the mention of his name).

Ducournau launched her film career in 2016 with the startling Raw, a story about a woman who develops cannibalistic urges. That drew comparisons with the early work of Canadian horror maestro David Cronenberg, which are only set to continue with Titane. The film drinks from the same well as Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Crash, relentlessly pursuing themes of identity, gender and the male gaze.

Titane stars newcomer Agathe Rousselle as Alexia, a woman with a penchant for violence and a fetishistic attraction to cars who has a metal plate in her head following an auto accident as a child. She works at a sleazy motor show as an exotic dancer, gyrating across the bonnets of shiny muscle cars in front of gawping men.

At one point when she’s alone, she slips inside a low-rider and brings herself to orgasm in one of the most bizarre sex scenes ever put on film. “Normally, you have sex with a human being,” Ducournau says. “She has sex with a car!”