Inside ’Titane‘, the year's ‘most shocking film’ that won the Cannes Palme d’Or

Spoilers for Titane follow.

The 2021 Cannes Film Festival was memorable for two reasons: First, that it was only the second time in the festival's 75-year history that a woman took the top prize, and second, that her winning film featured a scene where a woman has sex with a car and becomes pregnant — a scene that wasn't even the most controversial bit of the movie.

On Saturday night, Julia Ducournau made history as the second female filmmaker to win the Palme d'Or in the festival's 75-year history; New Zealand director Jane Campion tied for the award in 1993 with The Piano. But as Ducournau herself says, she would rather not be pigeonholed as a "woman director."

"That's always a bit annoying," she said in a separate interview. "As a woman, I don't want my gender to define me at all... I make movies because I'm me, not because I'm a woman."

That reluctance to identify as a "woman director" might also stem for Ducournau's own concept of gender, something she sees as "not really relevant for someone's identity" — an idea that appears numerous times in Titane as well.

Beyond the film's more brow-raising moments (after protagonist Alexia has sex with the car, she gets pregnant, replete with gasoline-lactating nipples and all), Titane is also a deft exploration of gender identity, female sexuality, body image, and family.

The Cliff Notes version of Titane reads as follows: After a car accident at a young age, Alexia gets a titanium plate installed in her head (hence, titane) — and finds herself with a newfound predilection towards cars. She works as a car-show model, where she's constantly ogled at by men: After one makes a pass at her, she stabs him in the skull with a piece of metal, thus beginning her run as a serial killer. Later, she disguises herself as a young boy — one who'd gone missing years before — and eventually runs into the boy's middle-aged father, who takes Alexia under his wing.

To keep up her disguise, Alexia binds her breasts and finds ways to hide her growing stomach. Meanwhile, her newfound father-figure grapples with his own addiction to steroids, a side-effect of his job as head fireman of a unit of young, strapping men. Somewhere in the delirium, the both of them learn to live with each other — a macabre spin on the found family trope.

It all sounds like a relentless fever dream — albeit one shot and acted in immaculate, exacting detail. And although Titane starts out with the skeleton of a typical female revenge film, Ducournau says that it was an intentional bait-and-switch.

"I use the whole setup as a trap, as a lure," said Ducournau. "It feels like a bit stereotype, the whole thing, and I play with that stereotype. Afterwards, it’s going to be all about constructing it, layer by layer by layer. Actually, [Alexia] can be pretty violent; actually, her sexuality is pretty fucked up. Oh, actually, she can be a man. You thought she was a woman! All that."

In between, Ducournau sprinkles a fair amount of gore and skin — early on, Alexia breaks her own nose in a disgustingly frank scene, and full-frontal female nudity is common — but it's never gratuitous.

Perhaps that level of gore is no surprise coming from Ducournau: Her previous film, the cannibal thriller Raw, was so explicit it purportedly caused moviegoers to pass out in the aisles.

In her victory speech for Titane, Ducournau thanked the jury for "letting the monsters in", but also reiterated the fact that gender should not be a deciding factor in victories — hers, or future ones.

“Quite frankly, I hope that the prize I received has nothing to do with being a woman,” said Ducournau, who added that more women will come after. “There will be a third, there will be a fourth, there will be a fifth.”