![]() ![]() Directing is pretty much making choices all the time – all the time, choices, choices – and you have to work with your instinct a lot. There’s no way you can achieve anything by not being in constant, utter, painful doubt – especially in my job. “Oh my God, that’s so funny! I never saw the Sorbonne as somewhere you had to be very confident in. She studied at the Sorbonne and at elite French film school La Fémis, places that presumably require some degree of confidence. They always told me that there’s one case per patient, that everyone reacts differently, everyone – and it’s incredibly humane to say that.”Īgathe Rousselle as Alexia in Titane: ‘If I show you something, it’s really happening,’ says Ducournau. I said: ‘I give you my brain, my heart, my body, I trust you, do what you want.’” It sounds like inflated actorly rhetoric, but when you see how far Titane takes Lindon from familiar territory – he’s more often seen in downbeat roles, embodying careworn, bourgeois crisis – then you see he’s not joking.īorn in Paris, Ducournau, 38, is the daughter of doctors – her mother a gynaecologist, her father a dermatologist. ![]() “She’s arrogant, and irresistible, like the great generals, like Napoleon. When I earlier asked Lindon about Ducournau, he made her sound, if not scary, certainly formidable. That involved committing to two years of weight training – in his early 60s, at that. Enough to tell Titane’s co-star Vincent Lindon – one of French cinema’s most eminent male leads – that he would have to completely transform his body for the role of fire chief Vincent. Confident maybe, but not that.”Ĭonfident she certainly is. Do people tell you you’re scary? Ducournau laughs. No, I meant Rousselle is angular, and also scary. ![]() I knew that her facial angles would transform every time I put my camera somewhere around her, that I would not get the same person.” “Of all the people I’d seen,” Ducournau says, “she was the one I wanted to film the most. Rousselle herself has described Alexia as a psychopath, although, Ducournau says: “There’s so much more grey zone about this character.” Wanting someone unfamiliar in the role, she set out on a search for androgynous faces it was her casting director who discovered Rousselle on Instagram. You want to give her everything Actor Vincent LindonĪlexia is played by Agathe Rousselle, an intense-eyed newcomer with extraordinary, sharp-edged facial features: her presence is unnerving and ambiguous, at once embodying vulnerability and all-out feral intensity. “There’s something pure and absolute about their love that emerges, beyond all the representations and lies and social constructs that we’ve been through in the film.” Julia is arrogant, and irresistible, like the great generals, like Napoleon. Beneath its layers of frenzied excess, Ducournau sees Titane as a love story between the pair. Running from the law, she masquerades as the lost son of a firefighter, with whom she forms a tense, tender relationship. Titane’s heroine is a young woman named Alexia who has a metal plate in her head, makes a living doing raunchy dancing at car shows, and also kills people. “I feel that my film talks about humanity very much,” Ducournau insists. Titane, I suggest, is considerably less respectable than you’d imagine a Palme d’Or winner to be (notwithstanding Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994) – not your expected sober, searching look at humanity. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images ![]() Women kicked serious ass this year.”ĭucournau with Titane stars Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, July 2021. It took 28 years and I believe it’s not going to take 28 years again.” She points to 2021’s award successes for women – Chloé Zhao at the Oscars with Nomadland, Venice winner Audrey Diwan ( Happening), Romania’s Alina Grigore in San Sebastián ( Blue Moon). Her win, says Ducournau in transatlantically inflected English, “was incredibly powerful to me. What you don’t expect is in-your-face sexuality, serial slaughter, a ferocious, electrically coloured techno-metal aesthetic – and radical DIY nasal surgery.īut that’s what you get in Ducournau’s Titane – only the second Palme d’Or winner by a female director, the first being Jane Campion’s shared win with The Piano in 1993. You expect humanism, seriousness, perhaps a dash of difficulty. The most revered and exalted award in cinema, a world away from the erratic glossiness of the Oscars, the Palme d’Or tends to honour films that both further the language of cinema and shed light on the loftier questions of earthly existence. “When I see a stereotype,” says French director Julia Ducournau, “I try to kill it.” She certainly did that in July by winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. ![]()
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