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(BFI London Film Festival, Titane, Saturday 09 October 2021 21:30, Southbank Centre, Royal Festival Hall)
"Titane"
"Titane" is a.very complex puzzle, with dense matter that we clearly needed to simplify. The central character is Vincent (Vincent Lindon). and his fantasy; this idea that through a lie, you can bring love and humanity to life. The character required a range of emotions that, in our eyes, only he's capable of, at once scary and vulnerable, childlike and dark, deeply human yet monstrous, especially with that impressive hulk of a body. The film initially seem unlovable because of it's violence, but then we grow deeply attached to the characters, and ultimately we receive the film as a love story. Or rather, a story about the birth of love because here, everything is a question of election. The character reminding us of Harvey Keitel’s massiveness in Abel Ferrara’s "Bad Lieutenant". It's the idea of surrendering to the character without necessarily holding all the keys to cinema. The sequence shot following the title introduces Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) as an adult. That sequence is there to impose a certain vision of Alexia, or more accurately, who others want her to be. This vision idealizes her, forcefully iconizes and sexualizes her, makes her obey a whole series of clichés. We've to see it as a decoy; we’re exploring a surface layer that hints at the ocean we’re about to plunge into, where we’ll discover a femininity with very blurry contours. This sequence is both extremely organic and totally disconnected from reality. The Alexia presented to us here does not align with the truth of the character. She has an unknown face. As she goes through her mutations. People watching the transformation of a physically familiar character. Someone the audience project any expectations onto. Someone they watch transform as the story plays out without being conscious of the artifice. A face that make us believe anything. Alexia is practically mute. It's a femininity with blurry contours.
We've to use the word malfunction to evoke the film ’s transformations. 'Derailmenttoo' too, because the story is peppered with machines and metal. How to do something graphic without losing the characters in the process? When it comes to lighting, the film works a lot within a cold/hot dichotomy. "Titane" is concerned with metal and fire, so the cold/hot relationship has to be ever-present. It's a a deep dive into contrast. The film constantly flirts with the limit, the limit being the cartoon; one step further and we fall into cartoonish. Push the shadow/light envelope as far as you can, without getting lost in an ultra-stylization that sucks the blood out of the characters and the action. The film focuses more on pictorial references than film references, the paintings of 'Caravaggio' in particular. "Titane" is inspired by Winslow Homer's 'Summer Night' and "The Empire Of Light" series by René Magritte. The light springs from the shadows in the same way emotion gushes after an initial shock. A lots of colors break with the darkness of the story and avoid an impression of inescapable sordidness. For the many nude scenes, the film uses lighting to reinvent the skin each time. The work with color makes it possible to bring new textures, meanings and emotions to the skin itself. "Titane" incorporates metal into the score. The music sounds metallic while still being melodic. As with 'RAW', it's a memorable recurring theme that's vary according to the characters’ trajectories. "Titane" goes from animal to impulsive to sacred. To help us feel that progression, the music must also fluctuate, hybridize, transform. We go from percussion to bells to electric guitar and sometimes everything combined. Then voices come in, bringing a liturgical dimension to the film. "Titane" creates a momentum towards the sacred. It's like bursts of light in the shadows. A metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys, often used in medical prostheses due to it's pronounced; biocompatibility.
