He sits Adrien down next to him, opens a family album, points to photos of Adrien as a young child laughing in the same yellow dress. But instead of reneging on his promise to protect his son, who has violated the covenant of masculinity, Vincent sets down an impossible course. Of course Adrien retreats into the literal closet where his father finds him. Of course Adrien's father returns home just as he's checking how the dress fits in the mirror. During one escape attempt, Adrien goes to the closet in his father's room, finds an old yellow dress left behind by his absent mother, and tries it on over his oversized men's clothes. But every time the viewer expects Vincent to discover Adrien’s secret and cast out the imposter, Vincent responds with sincere tenderness. Eventually, Vincent must learn that his son has breasts and a pregnant belly - that his son is not his son. With Adrien’s condition, Ducournau primes us for a scene of abject revelation and horrified rejection. Alexia therefore assumes Adrien's identity knowing that the façade has an expiration date eventually, Adrien will give birth, something teenage boys are not supposed to do. The car Alexia fucked has knocked her up, a detail that Ducournau clarifies (but does not explain) from the start the morning after they have sex, when Alexia starts to feel sick, her underwear is stained with motor oil. Among his many problems, the biggest might be that he’s pregnant. Adrien rides home silently with Vincent, declining to make eye contact or speak. He unequivocally identifies the broken boy as his son. His father, an aging firefighter named Vincent (Vincent Lindon), declines a DNA test. In Titane, there is no such thing as a transgender body because there is no such thing as a cisgender body.Īfter his bathroom transfiguration, Alexia qua Adrien shows up at a police station emaciated, bruised, and terrified. The more monstrous her protagonist gets, the more human, and beloved, they become. She is not great at being a normal girl - she kills the men who would make her one - and so she must be evil. Because she begins the movie by murdering people, Alexia initially seems to hew to the stereotype of the badly gendered villain. The movie siloes the threat of nonreproductive femininity in a transfeminine character so that cis women can go on bringing babies to term. Patricia intervenes to clear Charlie’s doubts and stabilize her role as “mother” within the reproductive order. Terminating the pregnancy is for the best, Patricia says, since the kid might turn out to be “an absolute disaster, like me.” As soon as she's said it, Charlie changes her mind: “But I love you,” she retorts as they leave the clinic. In the 2005 movie Breakfast on Pluto, a trans woman named Patricia accompanies her pregnant friend Charlie to an abortion appointment. Horror is a repository for such images, but even sentimental films about lovable trans characters reproduce this function. Both partners arc in pleasure: Alexia in the back seat, red seatbelts wrapped around her arms the car on its hydraulics, lurching. The car itself has been slamming the door, hoping to fuck. She opens the door to see the Cadillac she was dancing on in the scene prior, its headlights blaring, no one sitting behind the wheel. Afterward, as Alexia is washing off, her whole dressing room vibrates. When he leans in her car window to kiss her, she stabs him with a hairpin through the ear until his vomit runs down her chest. When a man follows Alexia to the parking lot after the show, aggressively attempting to seduce her, Alexia flips the script and becomes the penetrator. But almost immediately, Ducournau begins to rebel. The scene and its lines of power are stable, familiar. We’re at a car show, where everyone is in their expected place: Our protagonist, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), writhes sensually atop the hood of a flame-streaked Cadillac, while men stand around, gawking in appreciation. Julia Ducournau’s revelatory film Titane begins by reminding us of the rules.
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