Titane
A few days ago, on the eve of the fest, I wrote about how excited I was at the prospect of catching a number of films from directors who’d screened works in previous Cannes editions, but had only now found a spot in the official competition. Such was the case for Julia Ducournau, who’d first travelled to Cannes in 2016, when her cannibal coming-of-age thriller Raw nabbed the FIPRESCI award in the Critics Week. Watching her second feature, Titane, felt like treading into a familiar turf. The film features motifs Ducournau’s debut pivoted on, chiefly an interest in our bodily urges, in the fluidity and unpredictability of our desires. Much like Raw, it’s a gross-out peppered with stomach-churning moments, but one that swims between tenderness and brutality to complicate the distinction between humans and the objects we fetishize. It’s in that miraculous, unstable balance that Titane tips its hand: for all the horrors the film is drenched in, this remains a moving and uncomfortable rumination not just on the human body, but on what we call family.
At its center is Alexia, whom we first meet as a pre-teen girl caught in a near-fatal car accident; a titanium plate is stitched to her skull, leaving her with a permanent scar and a seemingly inescapable thirst for all things metallic. Next we see her (she’s played by Agathe Rousselle) dancing in a skin-tight outfit complete with fluorescent fishnets at a car show, an erotic performance Ducournau and cinematographer Ruben Impens capture in a single, breathless take, which sets the tone for the assaultive hour and a half that follows. Alexia is attracted to metal much like Raw’s Garance Marillier was to flesh (animal and human). But Titane teases out the ramifications of her sexual appetite to an extent its predecessor arguably did not. In an early scene—possibly the film’s most indelible, which is to say a lot here—the twenty-something ends up copulating with a car; lo and behold, the encounter leaves her pregnant, and hungrier than ever for metal and blood.
The killing spree that ensues is a triumph of almost unspeakable violence; hunted by the police, Alexia abandons her parents and finds refuge in a local fireman, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), passing as his son, Adrien, who went missing some years prior. Ducournau makes no mystery about how improbable Alexia’s metamorphosis is. In an effort to more closely resemble the lad, the girl shaves her head and breaks her own nose (one of several moments of self-flagellation shown in full). “Reunited” with her new father, she refuses to speak, communicating solely through glances and silent gestures. Whether or not Vincent believes her is, I suspect, besides the point. As played by Lindon, he careens through the film as a spiritually broken outcast, haunted by grief and the suspicion that his alpha days as head of the local fire brigade will soon be over. And so Titane morphs into a redemption tale for both man and woman, if one where the promise of a better future is constantly offset by the sight of Alexia/Adrien’s protruding belly.
Gory, visceral, and grisly, what’s most shocking about Titane is the compassion it wrings out amid the madness, which grows more vivid as the bond between Alexia/Adrien and Vincent turns into an unlikely parent-child rapport. That’s a credit to Ducournau, who nurtures the kind of intimacy with her damaged duo that makes it difficult to tell whether we should fear them or fear for them. And it’s a testament to the terrific, primal performances Rousselle and Lindon craft. In a film that plays out largely as a mute pas de deux, dancing becomes a vehicle through which the two can commune in a way verbal exchanges will never allow them. Halfway, the girl joins Vincent as he twirls with his fellow firemen in a neon-lit bar. It’s a rare, spell-binding moment of bliss, in which Ducournau turns to the extraordinary physicality of her actors and grants them access to a kind of spontaneity and joy that have so far eluded them. On this impossible dance floor, man and girl find a rhythm of life that follows none of the power structures Titane so perceptively outlines and then blurs. It’s a liberating, life-affirming moment.
The Tale of King Crab
Ducournau’s was one of the few films in competition for which I felt an electric encounter, an awe for what lies before the camera and can be conveyed through it. It took a bit of browsing in the festival’s parallel sidebars to find something quite as powerful. Screening in the Directors Fortnight, The Tale of King Crab is the first feature film by the Italian duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. It’s a film that unspools as a strange sort of fairytale, and it opens with a framing device that speaks to a world where stories like it were passed down from generation to generation. We kick off in a hunting lodge where a group of old men in present-day Italy gathers to share food and anecdotes from bygone years. This is how they remember—and how we meet—Luciano, a man who used to roam the same rural whereabouts sometime in the 1800s. Part drunk, part saint, part noble, Luciano (played by Gabrielle Silli) staggers into the frame as a kind of anarchist allergic to all forms of authority—here embodied by a local prince. There’s also a love interest that comes in the shape of a shepherd’s daughter, Emma (Maria Alexandra Lungu). But when the romance ends tragically, Luciano flees to the ends of the world in a self-imposed exile. As legend has it—the old men tell us over pasta—he became a missionary and set sail to the southernmost stretch of Argentina.
That’s where we bump into him next, as King Crab trades the luxuriant woods of the Italian countryside for the wind-swept, desolate barrenness of Patagonia. It is here that the film’s second and last chapter opens, as Luciano roams an island in search of a treasure local people claim can only be found by following a crab back to a secret lagoon. And that’s what the man carries in a bucket as he schleps up mountains and valleys—captured in all their belittling and prehistoric immensity by Simone D’Arcangelo’s cinematography—an ominous-looking silhouette clad in black like a distant cousin of Robert Mitchum’s preacher in The Night of the Hunter. He’s not alone: crustacean aside, there’s a group of pirates on his tail, determined to snatch the riches first. It’s a jarring shift in locale and tone, swelling what starts off as a rural fable into a western of sorts. But the two chapters do not function as separate, compartmentalized units; they are rooted in and connected by the same passion for storytelling the film emanates with contagious energy throughout.
Pirates, princes, crabs, treasure maps, gold-diggers, and shipwrecks… Billowing from the fantasy world of King Crab is an ancient pleasure, a childish enthusiasm that kept me hooked and hypnotized, prompting the question you’d expect from the very best of stories: what’s going to happen next? Rigo de Righi and Zoppis’s script turns into a nesting doll of tales-within-tales. If the first half tips its hat to the cinema of Alice Rohrwacher—with its bucolic vistas and pastoral pleasures—the second unfurls as a marriage between Lucrecia Martel’s Zama and Kelley Reichardt’s frontier tales. You could even argue that the stranger-in-a-strange-land madness Luciano incarnates in the film’s Argentinian chapter (“The crab is the compass,” he hisses, “and I am the map”) doubles as an invocation of Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog’s South American adventures. Consciously or not, these are the references King Crab evokes throughout, but the film follows in their footsteps with no sense of regurgitation. The language Rigo de Righi and Zoppis adopt—enriched by moments where characters break into songs—is very much their own, a singular idiom that feels fresh and alive, even as—or perhaps because—it harkens back and resurrects centuries-old storytelling traditions.
Neptune Frost
King Crab is just the kind of film that earned the Directors Fortnight a reputation as treasure trove for original, bold new voices. Directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost is another such gem. Part musical, part cyber-nightmare, it beckons us inside a surreal e-waste camp tucked deep inside the Rwandan jungle, where a hacking collective struggles to take down an authoritarian regime exploiting the country’s natural resources. We begin in a coltan mine, where a young worker, Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse) witnesses the death of his younger brother and fellow miner Tekno. Overwhelmed by grief, he flees and roams the forest, until a series of hallucinations lead him to the rebels’ headquarters. Parallel to his storyline, there’s another following a character that feels yanked from a dream—and in retrospect, probably is. That’d be the eponymous Neptune (played by two actors, Cheryl Ishehja and Elvis Ngabo), an intersex runaway Matalusa must join forces with for the insurgency to succeed.
It’s all confounding, labyrinthine, and absurdist—and the film knows it. In fact, it flaunts all its exuberance and oneirism with shameless swagger. “Maybe you’re asking what the fuck this is,” Neptune tells the camera as she first saunters into the frame; I’ll admit I did, and more than once. But this is no indictment—quite the opposite. Neptune Frost is suffused in a surrealist aura that makes experiencing it akin to surrendering to a dream. I say experiencing because “watching” doesn’t feel quite right; such is the power of the film’s visuals and sounds that I was locked in its reverie from the start. Shot by Uzeyman, there’s a sense that what you see unfolding onscreen isn’t photographed so much as conjured, as if in a seance; while Williams’s songs, full of portentous drums and mournful chants, lend the film’s labyrinthine narrative an emotional ballast. It’s as moving as it is entrancing.
Which isn’t to write off Neptune Frost as a mosaic of dazzling textures and sounds, all style and no substance. There is in Williams’s script a sense of urgency and anger that brought me back to the early films of Haile Gerima (and how great would it be if someone could program Neptune Frost in a double bill with his Harvest: 3000 Years). Admittedly, the Authority the hackers and miners rebel against remains an elusive and unshaped entity, evoked largely by their fretful anecdotes; similarly, there are moments when the insurgents' exchanges (“the system enforces our automation and suppresses the human spirit”) can feel a little laden, like flicking through the pages of a manifesto. But the stakes are real, as real as the pain in Williams’s telling. Nowhere does the syncretism between local myths and hi-tech feel more explicit—and stunning—than in Cedric Mizero’s costumes. The garments worn by Matalusa, Neptune, et al are candied in all types of cables and computer parts. It’s an afro-futurist aesthetic that’s couched as an anti-colonial call to arms, a sci-fi tale that looks at the future but is haunted by the past. “They use our blood and sweat to communicate with each other,” a character cries halfway through, “but they’ve never heard our voice.” In the disquieting utopia Neptune Frost brings to life, to fight is to re-appropriate one’s right to speak, sing, and exist.