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FILM Rory Kiberd Michael McDermott illustration:
Ross Carvill Titane Director: Julia Ducournau Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon Released: 31 December As Hollywood strains to demonstrate good morals, French Cinema thankfully sticks to plumbing the depths of human perversity. And what a delight that such an intrepid filmmaker as Julia Ducournau has won the Palme d’Or for this. Her debut, Raw, showed early promise. But despite some compelling moments, Raw ended up being a bit shapeless and less than the sum of its striking parts, with disconnected moments threaded together without narrative propulsion. Not so for Titane. While Ducournau’s digressive streak does show up here, it’s more triumphant, at the service of something much more indelible and coherent. We meet our anti-heroine, Alexia, as a child, who, having undergone a car accident, gets a titanium plate in her skull. But rather than make her wary of cars, her ordeal engenders a love affair with them. We fast-forward to Alexia as an adult, an erotic dancer, straddling a car at an exhibition. Afterwards, she kills a lascivious stalker with her hairpin. It turns out she’s been a serial killer for months – perhaps induced by that titanium plate. Oh, yeah, and she also has sex with a car – a good litmus test for your willingness to see this. Less tentative than with Raw, Ducournau has the courage of her batshit-crazy convictions here. With unflinching Cronenbergian body-horror, she doles out casual, bone-crunching brutality, largely abandoning realism for dream logic. Titane is teeming with gleeful Belfast Director: Kenneth Branagh Cast: Jude Hill, Caitríona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Judi Dench Released: 21 January Arriving off the back of scooping the People’s Choice Award at TIFF which is a strong bellwether for leading Oscar pic contenders (Nomadland won it in 2020) comes Branagh’s love letter to his hometown. Belfast tells the tale of a protestant family caught up in the escalation of violence, whilst living in a Catholic stronghold, during the early days of the Troubles in 1969. All of this is filtered through the child eyes of Buddy (Jude Hill) and evocatively filmed in black and white. It’s a Roma meets JoJo Rabbit without the emotional heft and grandeur of the former or the edge of the later. That said, Belfast oozes sentimental charm and endears throughout. It’s a tale of love and loyalty as the pressures of work and religion come to bear on the central couple (Dornan and Balfe) who are trying to raise their two boys amid civil strife. Escapism comes in the form of a love of movies (One Million Years B.C., Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) shown in the picture house and appearing in technicolour, Marchbox cars and a school crush for Buddy. There’s also the sage support of grandparents (Dench and Hinds) whose ‘can’t live with you, can’t live with out you’ type of love is beautifully observed and may well, deservedly, bag both of them Oscar nominations. Dench, in particular, summons all her acting prowess in the same way that Anthony Hopkins did in The Father. However, Belfast never quite elevates itself to classic cinematic status which it clearly aspires to - Balfe excels, Dornan wrestles between looks and range. There’s a try-hard scene towards the end which feels misplaced or a misfire as it attempts a cinematic grandeur but forgetting to bathe it in colour to indicate so. And whilst Van Morrison’s music is as quintessential to Belfast as the Lagan, it’s hard not to have his great canon be somewhat sullied at the moment by his anti-vaxx stance, which is also leading to unnecessary death and grief. Still, as a love letter Belfast is sealed by with a gentle kiss by Branagh and is likely to be warmly embraced. MMD Ailey Director: Jamila Wignot Released: 7 January At the height of its popularity, in the mid 1970s, the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre had been seen by 10 million people in 44 countries on six continents. For a black kid from Texas, who grew up picking cotton in poverty, Aileys’ is the hero story – the convenient one often used to deflect from racism and societal injustice. Jamila Wignot’s documentary celebrates the dancer, and explains his dance, using archival footage and interviews interspersed by the creation of a new dance piece by his eponymous company. “Sometimes your name becomes bigger than yourself, you don’t know who that is. You see a name but you don’t see a man,” says Carmen de Lavallade, the choreographer who danced with Ailey and witnessed his ascent and descent. A number of other dancers and associates shed light on the man who largely remained in the dark outside the stage spotlight. Ailey is still best known for his signature masterpiece Revelations, which premiered in 1960 when he was a mere 29-years-old. Set to spirituals, gospel and blues, it presents a vision of the historical African American experience from a church-inspired perspective, ranging from baptismal joy to slavery. Even though Ailey succumbed, like so many others, to the plight of AIDS in the late ‘80s, he has built an institution of enormous cultural pride and unparalleled popularity – a legacy cemented even further by this insightful documentary. MMD mutilation, violence as a sort of alchemy – Alexia breaks her own nose to evade police. Although you wince, you can’t help but admire Ducournau’s commitment to her visceral aesthetic. This is a director playing by her own rules. After all, Titane is impregnated by that comely car. Perhaps Titane is too brash and alien to be relatable, too stringently metaphorical to prompt sympathetic reflection. And yet, Titane almost achieves a weird poignancy as it boldly swerves from horror into an unlikely familial drama – Alexia, hiding out, pretends to be a fireman’s missing son. Ducournau has mostly made a cerebral ‘ideas’ film, rather than an emotional one. Still, being so thoroughly wrong-footed by this singular director is a rush. So what’s Titane about? The porousness of our identities? Our symbiosis with technology? Restrictive gender normativity? Whatever Ducournau’s intentions, such pointy-headed analyses feel beside the point. The urgency of this bizarre white-knuckle ride works on a gut-level and defies rationalisations. This is a film of blood, tears and engine oil. RK 56