by Nuha Hassan, Contributor

Julia Ducournau’s Titane is one of the wildest movies of the year. With its intense display of body horror and transformation, the movie pushes the boundaries of sexual visual imagery on screen. French cinema has dominated the industry with graphic and violent imagery of brutality, lust, and cannibalism. These kinds of experimentations in French Cinema are called, “The New French Extremity” coined by Toronto-critic James Quandt. In his essay, he based the term on the kind of negative for horror movies that display a body of work that contains transgressive imagery. Ducournau’s Titane is the latest movie that fits into the genre with sequence after sequence of images that are not meant for the faint of heart. 

In the first scene of the movie, a young Alexia sits in the back of her father’s car making noises and kicks the back of his seat. He tries his best to be patient and keep his eyes on the road, but when Alexia unbuckles the seat belt, her father turns around to calm her down but the commotion leads to an accident. At the hospital, Alexia goes through intensive surgery and the doctors insert a titanium plate over her skull. As a result, she has a scar above her right ear. Cut to the present day, Alexia (now played by Agathe Rousselle) is a dancer at a car showroom, who casually murders people with a chopstick that she sticks in her hair. When the authorities chase after Alexia, she binds her breast, cuts her hair and breaks her nose and pretends to be the long-lost son of firefighter Vincent (Vincent Lindon). Meanwhile, she is in much deeper trouble when she realises that she is pregnant after having sex with a car. 

It’s hard to make sense of the last sentence, but Alexia’s body goes through a transgressive change, as her breasts drip oil and her womb is made out of titanium. There is not much explanation as to why her body is created this way. Although, the assumption is that since the titanium is embedded in her skull, she can communicate with cars (and have sex), leading to her entire body being made out of the same material too. Its weirdness and violence are not indifferent to anyone familiar with Ducournau’s work. She made her directorial debut with Raw about a young vegetarian girl at a veterinarian school who tastes human flesh and eats a severed finger. Raw and Titane present the line between spectator and auteur, and the limits of what body horror means to the spectator. Ducournau has never been the kind of woman director to shy away from taboo topics, and her movies are uncomfortable and not made for the crude to watch. 

But does Ducournau’s portrayal of female sexuality and identity protest the borders of extremity in French cinema? Does cinema encourage grotesque imagery of violence and blood against women? These feminist studies have been crucial to how visual imagery presents the female body. Men and female bodies represent different meanings, the former being sex symbols more than women, while the latter is scrutinized and desired by the media. A woman's body has been sexualised since the beginning of time, and in the case of cinema, there tends to be a sexual focus on the female body. The new emergence of sexual freedom in cinema with the introduction of the feminine gaze brings women directors to the forefront of the conversation. 

However, in the case of body horror, the conversation is different. The victimization of women in horror is grotesque and violent. Since the male gaze tends to look at a woman's body from a predatory and oppressive gaze, and some female scholars have rejected the genre as being misogynistic. What if the female character is the victim and the monster? In Linda Williams’s essay “When The Woman Looks”, she states in the discussion of mainstream horror movies, the spectators need to see the sexual freedom presented in the film and the “titillating attention given to the women’s desires, is directly proportional to the violence perpetrated against women.” She continues, “The horror film may be a rare example of a genre that permits the expression of women's sexual potency and desire and that associates this desire with the autonomous act of looking, but it does so in these more recent examples only to punish her for this very act, only to demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be.” 

In both Raw and Titane, the violence is inflicted by women on themselves, images of horrific body modifications and self-mutilation to break the rules of the genre. The ravaged women are the centre of the movie and the screams, and the feminist analysis of these films represents a new kind of critique of female desire and sexuality. How Ducournau’s films escape the politics of disgust in the body horror genre is shown in how she approaches the story. Whether Ducournau is trying to dismantle the oppressive male gaze and desire, it is left to be wondered if these commodifications explore sexuality. The conventions of the body horror genre are meant to thrill, anticipate, shock and make the spectators uncomfortable. 

In Titane, a scene where Alexia is trying to bind herself again to pretend to be Vincent’s son, she is unable to perform that task. She screams in pain as a black liquid oozes out of her nipples. Alexia is unable to stop the oil from dripping and she gives up. The transgressive exposure is outrageous and unabashed, however, this kind of imagery towards femininity disrupts the norm. Ducournau sits in a male-dominated industry, and, incredibly, she can present grotesque imagery and her willingness to break the rules of the genre and industry. 

Titane and the surrounding conversations of the politics of disgust and the borders of body horror are outrageously magnificent. Ducournau’s movies are not for the faint of heart, but the way she approaches the genre with a revolting attitude towards eroticism and the boundaries of female spectatorship has changed the game. The addictive, yet disgusting, focus on self-mutilation and female flesh are meant to provoke viewers with disturbing imagery. With Raw and Titane, Ducournau crafts a movie that invokes a kind of emotional and physical response by displaying extreme modifications to the female body. Titane exceeds a lot of the expectations, and therefore, becomes a new addition to the New French Extremity subgenre.