it was a julia ducournau double bill on wednesday, baby!

loved both raw and titane. ducournau is a beast! brutal, unflinching cinema that reaches into your abdomen and grips onto your entrails, then pulls them out tenderly, cord by cord.

the structure of titane is looser than raw: where the latter bares its teeth wider and wider the further it goes on, the former lets its muscles come to rest. our protagonist morphs from hard, cold steel into malleable, cocooned tenderness, and what's remarkable is that this first mode of alienation - ostensibly, traditionally 'masculine' - is legible as feminine (our focus is solely with alexia, we focus on a cadre of erotic women dancers, the lighting heavy on pinks and reds) where the second mode of nurture - traditionally 'feminine' - is written as masculine (alexia becomes adrien, we enter an institution of men, the lighting cools through purple into blue).

what i'm trying to say is that the film keeps us and its characters in flux, deploying a variety of reversals (some subtle, some not-so) and parallels to scratch away the lines between bodies and machines, bodies and other bodies.

i don't think it's as tight or coherent as raw, but i do think it's the better film. it's shot gorgeously, the music is brilliant and it's very, very funny! definitely need to watch both again down the line. eagerly awaiting julia ducournau's next work