With only two feature films, French writer-director Julia Ducournau has quickly asserted herself as one of contemporary cinema’s most formidable forces.
Fresh from a momentous victory at last summer’s Cannes Film Festival, genre-bending thrill ride Titane crashed onto UK screens earlier this month. Described by the BBC as “the most shocking film of 2021,” Julia Ducournau’s sophomore effort made history as she became only the second woman to raise the coveted Golden Palm, nearly three decades after Jane Campion won for The Piano in 1993. An admirable achievement made all the more impressive when it is considered that Titane is also the first ‘horror’ to procure cinema’s most prestigious prize. Ducournau, then, is something of a ground-breaker.
Born in Paris to a dermatologist father and gynaecologist mother, it is well documented that Ducournau’s formative perceptions were profoundly influenced by her parents’ professions; bodies, and in particular flesh, would become the defining visual hallmark of her work. Of course, any mention of cinematic flesh must refer itself back to ‘Dave Deprave’ himself—David Cronenberg—who Ducournau also arguably draws from. Yet whilst these two sources may have provided the initial inspiration for her intense fascination with guts ‘n’ gore, they also seem to have embedded within Ducournau something much more valuable; a keen understanding of the inextricable relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual. In an echo of Cronenberg, Ducournau often paints the inner landscape of individual identity through the permutation and transformation of the outer skin.
Unfortunately, since Cronenberg’s cinema is such an obvious point of comparison, Ducournau has repeatedly been branded with the same restrictive ‘body-horror’ label that the Canadian has borne since the 70s. At the heart of her work, however, lies a much more eclectic nucleus of influences. “Reading Edgar Allan Poe… opened a space in my mind” she stated in a recent Guardian interview, indicating the origins of her gothic visual sensibility and thematic fixation with the macabre. The dark symbolism undulating throughout Poe can also be found in another of Ducournau’s key inspirations—the gruesome, violent epics of Greek mythology. Titane in particular adapts the elemental and familial themes recurrent in these ancient texts, with Ducournau using Hesiod’s genealogy of primordial deities as a conceptual springboard for her metallic maternity narrative.
With these literary infatuations present at an early age, it is not surprising that the young Ducournau initially embarked on a writing career. After graduating from the Sorbonne, she attended France’s premier film school, La Fémis, to study screenwriting. Yet within her first year, Ducournau came to realise that in order for the essence of her work to translate onto the silver screen, she herself would have to direct the material. “If I only wrote, I would feel my work was not completed” she told CrypticRock.com in 2017. Thus, Ducournau was compelled to channel her twin passions of literature and cinema through both camera and pen, culminating in her first official short film, Junior, in 2011.
In the first of multiple Ducournau appearances, Garance Marillier plays the eponymous Junior, a pimple-covered 13-year-old tomboy on the verge of early womanhood. After an intense bout of stomach flu, she makes a peculiar discovery—her skin, peeling, has ripped entirely down the curvature of her spine. Needless to say, Junior’s central metaphor here is not exactly subtle. Regardless, it is a remarkably assured directorial debut that not only garnered Ducournau the Petit Rail d’Or award at Cannes but also helped to delineate several preoccupations of her still-nascent cinema: the nuanced complexities of the young female experience; family dynamics particularly between sisters; and most significantly, the metamorphosis of the self, both internal and external.
A little-seen TV movie titled Mange (2012) followed the early promise of Junior, yet it was Ducournau’s feature-length debut Raw (2016) that brought international attention to her work for the first time. Reprising her role as an anxious adolescent in the throes of maturity, Marillier stars as a first-year veterinary student and devout vegetarian Justine. Upon her arrival at university, a particularly brutal series of hazing rituals begin, leading to all freshers being ordered to consume a raw rabbit kidney. With the forceful encouragement of wild-child elder sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf), Justine reluctantly does so; the result is an emergence within her of a primal, insatiable craving for meat—of all kinds.
Infamously, the relentless and uninhibited gruesomeness of Raw caused two audience members to faint during a screening at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. To suggest Ducournau’s film is nothing more than a grisly gore-fest would be a mistake; underneath Raw’s bloody skin lies a feminist coming-of-age narrative that examines the intricacies of growing up with all the subtle sentiment and humour of a Richard Linklater movie. A contemporary bildungsroman wrapped in the guise of a cannibal shocker, Ducournau’s debut is a work that refuses to be generically categorised whilst still making a striking sensory impression. Such an impression, in fact, that Raw would go on to win Ducournau’s second prize at Cannes, the FIPRESCI, and become one of the most widely acclaimed films of the decade.
After the wild breakout success of her first feature, Ducournau—like many a musician undertaking their second album—entered something of a writer’s block. As she told Anna Bogutskaya in a recent BFI interview, the “crippling” weight of her own high expectations led to a year-long creative stagnation. Ducournau’s only route of escape was to bury the triumph of Raw, tell her inhibitions to “fuck off”, and simply begin to write. The resulting screenplay, spawned from a recurring nightmare of giving birth to machinery, was the instinctive, fiercely radical techno-drama Titane that arguably defies boundaries even more vehemently than her first feature.
In her feature film debut, Agathe Rouselle is excellent as Ducournau’s taciturn protagonist Alexia. Working as a motor showgirl, she has a distinctive, nautilus-shaped scar where a titanium plate was fitted after a serious car crash in her youth. With this operation, it seems Alexia has not only lost a part of her humanity but also gained something perversely mechanical. A bizarre mechanophilic encounter with a car soon takes place, resulting in her oily impregnation by a large flame-covered Cadillac.
Attempting to elucidate the eddying whirlpool of conceptual and tonal shifts in Titane is perhaps something of a lost cause. Ducournau’s second feature, whilst certainly less cohesive than her first, is a dizzying amalgamation of bodily violence, gender fluidity, and genre cinema. Harrowing in some parts and hilarious in others, it irrepressibly jumps from pitch-black gallows humour to the sobering consequences of paternal loss, finally culminating in an edifying declaration of the transformative power of the agapeic. Despite the obvious differences between Raw and Titane, a fundamental facet binds them indivisibly; a rich vein of humanity, throbbing through Ducournau’s entire body of work with all the visceral intensity of her blood-soaked set pieces.
At only 38 years old, it is alarming to think that the best may still be to come from Ducournau. “Thank you to the Jury for letting the monsters in” she proclaimed upon receiving Cannes’ highest honour; “thank you for helping me to be free”.
Words by Will Jones
Support The Indiependent
We’re trying to raise £200 a month to help cover our operational costs. This includes our ‘Writer of the Month’ awards, where we recognise the amazing work produced by our contributor team. If you’ve enjoyed reading our site, we’d really appreciate it if you could donate to The Indiependent. Whether you can give £1 or £10, you’d be making a huge difference to our small team.