We live in the best of times in which we are able to learn about the world and its incredible diversity of cultures/beings/places/perspectives in a way never historically possible. We live in the worst of times when we are able to isolate ourselves completely from anything different from our own narrow view/conception of the world/reality. The choice is yours!
Monday, November 28, 2022
Titane (France/Belgium: Julia Ducournau, 2021)
Titane (France/Belgium: Julia Ducournau, 2021: 108 mins)
Doherty, Caitlin. "Enter: Monsters."New Left Review (January 28, 2022) ["In an introduction to Frankenstein, written for a new edition of the work in 1831, Mary Shelley recounted a question she had been asked frequently in the thirteen years since the novel’s publication: how had she, ‘then a young girl, come to think and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea?’ A prying concern permeates the query, as if the monstrosity of the work’s content must indicate perverse conditions of production, some titillating mistreatment inflicted on the nineteen-year-old Shelley that could justify the creation of a new category of monster. For Julia Ducournau, director of the Palme D’Or-winning Titane (2021), the fallacy of the question would be obvious. No backstory is necessary: to be a young girl is monstrous inspiration enough."]
Eggert, Brian. "Titane."Deep Focus Review (October 3, 2021) ["In the first images of Titane, the camera lingers on engine parts shot like sweaty appendages, dripping with perspiration and vibrating orgasmically with the motor’s hum. The metal shimmers with grease and droplets of oil, and its curves look almost fleshy in the way they bend and give way to the rolling shapes in the undercarriage. French director Julia Ducournau films these inhuman auto parts like erotica, exploring the connection between bodies and automobiles in ways not attempted since David Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 film, Crash, about the relationship between the little death and the death drive. The link between sexuality and cars has been there for a long while. After all, why do they call a mechanic’s workspace a body shop? Consciously or not, motorheads make these connections as well. Car magazines and calendars pair bikini-clad women with muscle cars and hot rods, coupling sex and automobiles in literal and figurative terms. Ducournau’s film considers how the male gaze creates this strange relationship of images and takes the next logical step. The result is something wildly original, brutally visceral, oddly funny and tender, and singular in its vision."]
Kiang, Jessica. "Titane: The New Flesh Is Thriving, Living Rent-Free in Julia Ducournau’s F*cked Up Metallica Brain [Cannes Review]."The Playlist (July 13, 2021) ["We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having. “Titane,” Ducournau’s follow-up to her sensational debut “Raw,” is roughly seven horror movies plus one bizarrely tender parent-child romance soldered into one machine and painted all over with flames: it’s so replete with startling ideas, suggestive ellipses, transgressive reversals and preposterous propositions that it ought to be a godforsaken mess. But while God has almost certainly forsaken this movie, He wouldn’t have been much needed around it anyway. Ducournau’s filmmaking is as pure as her themes are profane: to add insult to the very many injuries inflicted throughout, “Titane” is gorgeous to look at, to listen to, to obsess over, and fetishize."]
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