NOTE: This is a new release and the review is based off a theatre viewing. This means the review won’t feature common elements like visual analysis, extended theme analysis, or long-form discussions of the cinematic techniques being used. Once I am able to get a copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from the review will be updated to match the current site’s standard.
The camera crawls over the internal workings of a car engine, jumping from one section to another, canvassing each in sensuous manner. Country music strings can be heard intermingled with the mechanical noises of the engine proper. Eventually, the film cuts inside of the car; now the engine’s rumbles are replicated by a young girl, Alexia, who delights in her loud and boisterous emulation much to the chagrin of her father who turns up the country music louder and louder as a response.
Upset with her father’s refusal to be her plaything, Alexia starts to repeatedly kick his chair before then taking off her seatbelt to presumably cause more havoc. Her father immediately turns back to yell at her and ends up losing control. Crash. She flies and suffers a head wound. Disfiguration. At the hospital, her head is outfitted with a titanium plate. Transformation. Titane is here. Metal has become flesh. Alexia has been reborn as cyborg proper, a child of metal. Far from just emulating its hums, she now is partly composed of it.
After the procedure, Alexia ignores her father and goes out to the car. Due to her crash, one would expect some kind of traumatic response, but Alexia goes to kiss the vehicle, showering it with a kind of love that seems all the more absurd given her seeming lack of feeling to her parents. Her kinship is with the world of metal and not with the world of humanity; metal becomes more skin than skin itself – a reorientation towards flesh. Just like Raw, director Julia Ducournau is most interested in breaking down the boundaries of where flesh stops being banal and starts being something worth protecting. Instead of utilizing cannibalism as the means of navigating the contours of what renders flesh valuable, she uses Alexia’s fetishistic relationship to metal.
Jump to the future. Country strings are replaced by The Kills’ “Doing It To Death” – a sign of things to come. An older adult Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) struts confidently through an underground car facility. Cinematographer Ruben Impens captures her movements in a smooth tracking shot that never breaks, gliding through a erotic gallery of bodies moving, women dancing evocatively over the hoods of cars as customers wait and watch, before finally revealing Alexia as one of these women. Unlike Raw’s gorgeous one-shot tracking shot of a rave scene meant to demonstrate it’s main characters disorientation, Titane’s introductory one-shot highlights its protagonists wholehearted embrace of an sensual and no-bars lifestyle. Far from learning discipline from her car crash, Alexia has only become more emblazoned; it’s no coincidence that car she dances on top is painted with flames. She’s an unrestrained fire that seems hellbent on “doing it to death”.
She leaves the show but is accosted on the way to her car by a fan who gives chase to her. The situation is clearly uncomfortable; the nature of his approach is downright predatory and his actions afterwards, including a non-consensual kiss, make it clear that Alexia can’t easily get away from him. Curiously, she leans in to him and begins kissing him more passionately, seemingly rewarding his unwarranted advances with tacit approval. However, this clearly is demonstrated to be far from the case as she quickly removes a long, pointed, hairpin and quickly stabs the unsuspecting fan through his ear, killing him in brutal fashion. The point of injury is near the same point of her own titanium implant – the site of which is still fleshy and observable. In her own way, she has rendered unto her attacker a similar injury – a ritual reenacting her own trauma.
Once home, she takes a shower and attempts to wash away the events of the night. But as soon as she steps out of the shower, the walls and floors start to rumble and shake. A mirror against the wall reflecting Alexia shakes and threatens to come off. Alexia opens the door to discover the source of the noise and realizes that the rumbles are coming from her flaming car. It’s calling to her, beckoning her forward. She answers its calls and gets into the vehicle. Ducournau pushes it to 11 at this point and gives the audience a small taste of what’s to come, as it is at this point Alexia begins to have passionate sexual relations with the car, moaning and rejoicing in the vehicle as she would any other lover. The scene cuts from Alexia writhing in ecstasy within the metal cocoon to shots of the car buckling up and down, shaking all around, confirming its status as fully alive.
Consequently, the experience pushes Alexia to embrace her relationship with metal qua flesh in more radical fashion. It’s revealed that far from considering metal superior, she considers it the only flesh worth protecting. Far from being a chance murder, it turns out that the ear-impaled fan is only one of Alexia’s many victims; she’s a mass murderer of sorts and kills people as easily as people eat their meals. Human flesh isn’t sacred or relevant to her; she has no reason to love it and treats it as nothing more than a nuisance. Eventually, things catch up and she’s forced to abandon her home, her parents, and occupation. Made to carve out a new station in life, Alexia proceeds through an entanglement of metal and skin in an attempt to carve out a orientation towards the flesh, one predicated on love.
Like Raw, Titane features gory set-pieces tied to the themes of the story, impeccable and uncomfortable sound design that emphasizes squelching, and a host of perverse orientations towards the flesh. However, unlike Raw, which features a mainly straight-forward, albeit textured, story, Titane is far more ambitious in the scope of its themes and the surreal, almost dream-like way its narrative proceeds, choosing to show character interactions and reactions instead of explaining them or having anyone mention them explicitly. Ducournau is clearly in her element here and deftly weaves ideas about gender expectations against Alexia’s ongoing relationships with flesh, demonstrating that what conditions and furnishes meaning is not blood or similarity, but an ability to feel love. Form matters less than content, a notion that’s stretched to its limits as Alexia navigates the borders of both gender and humanity in an attempt to find meaning in her life.
Her journey and it’s development are made all the more obvious by the no-holds barred fashion in which Ducournau captures the macabre, often times showing the bloody in a nonchalant and apathetic fashion thereby giving brutal murder sequence s a sick comedic undertone that less squeamish viewers will enjoy. Murder stops being the focus and its purpose becomes the point of focus, as Alexia’s murderous drives change form as she considers what makes flesh normatively valuable. Agathe Rousselle makes these moments of transformation palpable, rendering a variety of expressions from tired, but otherwise unfazed to broken in and devastated. It’s no small feat that she gets the viewer to invest in and root for a serial murderer whether they think she’s going to change her lifestyle or not.
Thus, far from just being a set of gore-pieces held together by indecipherable plot threads, Titane is meticulous and precise, with even small details blowing up quietly in the background of the film as it goes on. At every point, Ducournau focuses on showing the way flesh, metal or human, engenders its own preservation via inculcating love in others, demonstrating that the connecting force between subjects/objects is not so much perceived sameness as the possibility for affection between them. Because of this, even the more outlandish plot elements make sense within the confines of the story even if the actual reasons behind them or the way they culminate aren’t completely known to the viewer. For those willing to spend the analyzing the parallels, Titane offers a gory story that not only manages to captivate from start to end but also manages to showcase the true powers of love.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Though largely silent and visual, Titane, far from having too little to say, has a wide breadth of fleshy ideas it dives into and explores. The juxtaposition of human skin and metal along with idea of gender as a socially coded role gives Ducournau room to explore what renders flesh something worth caring about and protecting. Though more squeamish viewers might be put off, those looking for a film that invites the them to think and engage with them without giving all the answers will find more than their fair share’s worth in Titane.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
A girl walks along the side of a road. A car drives down the the road. The girl disappears from view. The girl runs in front of the car. The car crashes against a tree and the girl walks towards the front seats of the car. The red colored tite card appears in silence. The movie starts with a jolt in the form of a car crash. A young woman appears for a moment. A car shows up. The woman is gone. Then as the sound of the car gets nearer she jumps out and causes the vehicle to swerve and crash. The sound of strings get more intense as she approaches the front doors of the car….and then silence. The title card comes in in bright bloody red.
A young woman walks down a long road, seemingly fading into the trees around her. A cut reveals a car coming from the other side of the road. However, when the camera cuts back, the girl is now missing. As the sound of the car approaches the frame, the girl runs out from the trees, jolting both the driver and the audience. The car swerves to try and avoid her but ends up crashing against a tree – the previously alive members of the car now rendered pieces of flesh. The girl lies for a few moments before getting up and walking towards the car and opening up a front door; her movement is accompanied by harsh strings which burst to a crescendo before dissipating into silence as the blood red title card bursts onto screen.
Justine (Garance Marillier) asks for food and declines any meat. Her visage is covered by the reflection of the flesh she’s refused. Justine(Garance Marillier) realizes some meat has gotten into her food and informs her mother (Joana Preiss) and father(Laurent Lucas). Justine(Garance Marillie) and her father(Laurent Lucas) exchange a smile as her mother berates the restaurant for the slip-up. The family is vegetarian and meat is inexcusable. Justine (Garance Marillier) looks out, bracing herself for her future college experience. She notices her mother(Joana Preiss) and father(Laurent Lucas) lovinly regard one another. Justine(Garance Marillier) puts her hands between her legs and starts to rub them in anticipation? Justine’s dog comes into the frame and disrupts her sense of zen. Justine (Garance Marillier) is left alone in the parking lot of her school with her sister nowhere in site. This moment of violence is juxtaposed by a scene of innocence. A young woman, Justine, gets food with her parents at a restaurant. She tries to avoid getting any meat on her plate but despite making her intentions known, flesh still makes its way into her mouth. She informs her mother who berates the restaurant over causing her vegetarian family grief, before then departing with her family to be dropped off for her first year at veterinary school. While they drive along, she notices passions between her parents, passions which engender an idyllic state of peace. This moment of comfort is interrupted by her dog which leaps into the frame, marking the end of her “childhood” and the start of her coming-of-age journey as she’s dropped off at her new school, forced to make her way without parental help anymore.
The film cuts to another young woman, Justine (Garance Marillier) purchasing food and the burst of violence which came earlier seemingly bears no relation. Justine is framed against a glass counter; her image has an assortment of meats projected against it – an image of flesh rendered from an animal juxtaposed against an image of flesh moving in the form of a human. The food worker asks Justine if she wants protein to which Justine responds she doesn’t want meat. However, as she sits down with her mother (Joana Preiss) and father (Laurent Lucas) to eat, she notices something off with her food: the presence of animal flesh. Quickly, she informs her mother of the issue who promptly gets up to ream the kitchen staff over their mistake: her family is vegetarian and the meat should have never been there. Justine and her father exchange smiles with one another; this situation is one that is familiar to them and they’re both used to Justine’s mother’s militant reactions.
After the debacle, the family unit makes their way to drop Justine off at veterinary school for the start of her first semester. As the drive unfolds, Justine notices the warmth her parents have for one another and feels the rays of sunshine brush over her. She places her hands between her legs and starts rubbing them, but her idyllic moment is interrupted by her dog who starts to lick her face – this time a live animal present in the family unit. Her parents inform her of the location of the grocery store, the morgue, and the medicinal area: a factory of flesh where bodies are rendered as food, as cadavers, and as patients to be treated.
The duo drops Justine off under the assumption that her sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf), who also attends the school as a sophomore, will pick her up despite commenting that Alexia’s tendencies make her hard to control. Consequently, after her parents leave, Justine is made to walk to school herself, her sister nowhere in sight, the first of many hurdles to come.
Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) introduces himself to Justine (Garance Maraillier) as her roomate. He explains he’s queer while holding a green ski-pole. Justine (Garance Marillier) and Adrien’s (Rabah Nait Oufella) room is ransacked by masked “terrorists” who break and destroy everything while forcing the two of them out. The first years are forced to crawl in their undergarments – a process of humiliation……which is then revealed to be nothing more than hazing. After completing the first part of the initiation, the first years are invited to a rave. Justine (Garance Marillier) walks through the maze of carnal pleasures. She notices Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) making out with another guy. Justine (Garance Marillier) runs into Alexia (Ella Rumpf) at the party. Her sister didn’t have time to pick her up but is here at a rave. Burts of light reveal that Justine (Garance Marillier) and Alexia’s path goes through rooms filled with animal monstrosities including a mock-up of a spider-sheep. Alexia (Ella Rumpf) shows Justine (Garance Marillier) a picture of their parents after having done their own initiation. Justine (Garance Marillier) tries to get some rest after spending the entire night partying, but her efforts to get some peace and quiet are thwarted when she hears Adrien getting ready to have sex. Justine’s first day proves to be unadulterated chaos. Instead of getting a woman as a roommate, she gets a queer man. Then her possessions and room are broken into and ransacked by masked hoodlums who force her and the other first years to engage in humiliating trials before then revealing that this is just part of a hazing initiation. Upon finishing the first task, the students are invited to a rave. The torrent of pleasures is too much for Justine to handle given her disposition and she stumbles to find a foothold. It’s at this point she runs into her sister, Alexia, who offers her a respite from the rave in the form of a vision of the future. Alexia shows Justine a picture of their parents who also finished the same initiation Justine is going through now – a sign of approval.
Unfortunately, this is the smallest of Justine’s problems. As night falls, she’s woken up by a man, Adrien(Rabah Nait Oufella) who intrudes her room holding a ski pole. She asks him what he’s doing and he informs her that they’re roommates. Given that she requested another woman for a roommate, she’s understandably upset by the presence of a man, but Adrien immediately attempts to assuage her concerns by admitting that he’s queer, offering his sexuality as an explanation for why the college would place them together. According to the system, woman and queer man are interchangeable, or so he suggests.
However, before Justine can process this new revelation, her dorm room is broken into by a wild horde of masked bandits who force all the first-year students out into the hallway after throwing their possessions out of the window. Like the car crash that inaugurates the film, this burst of violence is random and seemingly lacks purpose. The fresh batch of students are forced to strip down and crawl in humiliating fashion by the masked group, who then reveal that the absurd theatrics are just part of a hazing ritual; the violence is thus rendered coherent by social practice. Upon finishing the first part of the ritual, the group is invited to a rave, which cinematographer Ruben Impens gloriously captures in a one take that follows the innocent Justine as she’s thrust into a realm of excessive enjoyment.
Vibrant blues and reds color the walls, disorienting a Justine who desperately seeks footing in the sweaty, chaotic, throng of bodies. Every extra on the screen moves and dances with such passion that the rave scene gains a vitality of its own, moving and proceeding in such a way as to swallow Justine. First, she sees Adrien and moves towards him but backs off after seeing him in passionate throws with another man. Eventually as she traverses the labyrinth of pleasure, she runs into her Alexia and embraces her. Finally, the sisters are united and Alexia excitedly takes her little sister to another location to show her something.
The students tranquilize a horse to get it ready for a procedure. The horse’s eyes show a vitality that persists in spite of its incapacitated nature. Justine (Garance Marillier) showcases a similiar vitality behind her eyes, as she stands shocked at the nature of the procedure and the gaze of the horse upon her. The powerful beast lies fully immobile and gazes onwards. Justine’s first lesson has her witnessing a horse being tranquilized for a procedure. The majestic beast capable of immense strength is immediately rendered immobile. However, it’s vitality persists and is rendered in its gaze, a gaze which Justine seems to share as she stares at the creature frozen in fear herself.
Classes begin and the students witness a surgery procedure done on a horse. Ordinarily so energetic and powerful, the creature is reduced to a passive state via tranquilizers. However, the vitality driving the horse is still very much present in its eyes, which gaze directly at the screen. Justine’s shocked expression at the situation strikes a parallel – both gazes reveal an animalistic drive waiting to be released. Consequently, the green background takes on a feeling of domesticated vitality. Green is both “alive” and “in control”.
Justine (Garance Marillier) notices a splotch of red liquid drip onto her white coat as she takes her class picture. The splotch turns into a barrage, as a torrent of of blood falls onto Justine (Garance Marillier) and her class. Justine (Garance Marillier) and her classmates’ faces are coevered in blood. The class photo is taken. This group isn’t traitorous. Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) eats his rabbit kidney as Justine (Garance Marillier) protests eating the same due to her vegetarian diet. Alexia (Ella Rumpf) eats the rabbit kidney instead of supporting her sister like their mother would have. Alexia(Ella Rumpf) feeds Justine (Garance Marillier) the rabbit kidney. Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) helps Justine (Garance Marillier) as she recoils from the impact of ingesting meat. Justine’s class experiences first a baptism by blood followed by sacrament in the form of rabbit kidneys as proof of their commitment to the initiation. While Justine accepts the former, she refuses the latter on the grounds of her vegetarian beliefs. She calls out to her sister for help in the same way she called her mother at the start of the film. However, unlike their mother, Alexia has no interest in helping Justine regulate herself and force feeds her sister the piece of flesh. The experience both disorients and traumatizes Justine, who is forced to rely on Adrien to stay on her feet afterwards.
In comparison, the color red, while also being “alive”, is far from control and expands excessively. As Justine stands with the other first years for their photo, she notices a drop of red fall on her bright white coat before suddenly being engulfed in gallons of blood along with her classmates. Now her years picture has been finished; so far, she is not a traitor. She too is marked and the red blood her parents and sister were marked by in the past.
She and Adrian make their way to a line serving “something” all conscripts have to consume. When Justine gets to the front of the line, she figures out that the “something” is nothing other than a raw rabbit kidney. In protest, Juliet argues she’s a vegetarian and should not have to engage in the deed, going so far as to call Alexia to confirm their family’s dietary restrictions. Her outburst makes sense given her orientation towards the non-human: she believes non-human animals have rights and dispositions that would render harm done to them as ethically problematic as harm done to humans. If she eats rabbit flesh, what’s to stop her from eating human flesh?
However, Alexia is not Justine’s mother; instead of helping Justine out, she instead eats a piece of the rabbit kidney and then feeds an emotionally devastated Justine another piece – baptism by meat. With her strict vegetarian lifestyle and ethical orientation now cracked, Justine’s sense of self and appetite are unbound – the barrier to a whole realm of actions are now open as her ethical consistency allows her to logically engage in more obscene interactions with flesh.
Raw is thus, in both a metaphorical and literal sense, an exploration of the limits of the body and the way violence to it is rendered coherent or excessive. Flesh is what holds the metaphorical trappings of the film together: animals and humans become the same through their capacity to be eaten and be sexualized. Practices towards flesh are rendered acceptable or unacceptable, not based on harm, but based on coherence with social norms.
At a visual level this is established in the colors themselves – both red and green represent an orientation towards vitality. The difference lies in obscenity – green is domesticated and red is excessive. It’s no coincidence that greens coincide with vegetables and red coincides with meat. As a vegetarian, Justine is virginal, innocent, and child-like. The first time the viewer sees her is dressed in a white unicorn t-shirt while being protected by her parents.
Then, as soon as Justine gets to college, she’s forced to grow up and deal with a world that tells her to enjoy at the cost of everything else. There are no parents left to demarcate and keep her insulated. In an environment filled with alcohol, sexual relations, ritualistic proceedings, and meat, it’s easy to see how someone could lose their grasp and succumb to the injunction to enjoy. Her cannibalistic desires are not merely excuse for gory violence but rather represent her longing to find herself. They come up at the same time her sexual desires awaken. Both desires related to the flesh arise in an environment where flesh is ubiquitous: college students looking to fornicate, animals waiting to be treated, cadavers lying in a morgue. Thus, Justine is forced to navigate the corporeal matrix of bodies in as many manners as she can, to get a better grasp on herself.
In this way, Raw rides the fine line between coming-of-age story about a young woman trying to find her place in world at large and David Cronenberg-esque body-horror that seeks to locate the line where animal instinct ends and human behavior begins. As a result, the story is able to both shock the audience with playful gore, but also play off those macabre moments in comedic fashion. A “seven minutes in heaven” session, which would be normally be an anxiety fueled place of hilarious sexual blunder, becomes darkly comedic when amped up with the possibility of cannibalism. An already awful situation just gets amped up to the next level which reveals something about the nature of the activity itself.
Through constantly juxtaposing both accepted and non-accepted forms of relationality to flesh, director and script-writer Julia Ducournau is able to demonstrate how the condemnation against something as seemingly excessive as cannibalism, is nothing more than an arbitrary construct. How is it bloodier than eating meat from an animal? Why is ethically more invasive than recording people’s downfalls and posting them online? What trait makes the practice more egregious than the hazing committed by the school’s seniors? These questions gain traction because Ducournau sequences the movie by first exposing a “prohibited” relationship to the flesh, demonstrating a counterpoint to that relationship that’s socially accepted, and then using then having the first relationship bleed into the guise of the second. Because she focuses on the body in such careful and clinical fashion, even the obscene relationships it brings about are rendered cognizable and comparable to more commonplace relationships. These connections are made all the more apparent because non-human animal bodies are present in abundance, providing a variety of counterpoints to the relations being shown.
Furthermore, the distinctive manner in which Ducournau directs the bodies of her actors highlights a corporeal malleability. In scenes with extras, everyone moves organically with explosions of difference happening in the tapestry of the frame. This ability to create points of difference extends to even the facial movements of the actors. In particular, Garance Marillierenlivens Justine in the subtle ways she intensifies her gazes, shifts her eyebrows, and re-centers her body weight transforming from dainty waif to predator. The corporeal possibilities inherent in the body become “actualized” which in turn gives the films themes a heftier flavor.
By quite literally showing the ways people mark one another in their actions via cannibalism itself, Raw serves as a powerful reminder of the way our bodies are constantly open to and in proximity of other bodies, rendering both avenues for enjoyment and suffering based on the orientation we approach them. Ducournau’s debut feature majestically weaves through the contours of the body to reveal the contingencies of our relationships, both to ourselves and our notion of humanity proper. And it somehow manages to do all this while remaining a charming and cognizable story that anyone, sans the extremely squeamish, can watch and enjoy.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Raw is an underappreciated horror gem of the 2010’s that deserves more recognition not only for its fresh and innovative take on women’s ability to relate in and to the world, but also for its perfect use of cannibalism as both horror and tool for metaphor. It’s a film that shocks, but then asks the viewer what exactly was shocking , forcing the viewer to confront the way they’ve normalized structured of discipline and violence.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S+
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
