The moments that make movies | Titane: A striptease atop a fire truck

Often all it takes is a scare, a car chase, a musical number or a meet-cute for a movie to forever be etched in our memories. The scene may be a moment you can’t shake off or a whole sequence of them. This series will profile such immortal moments that encapsulate the essence of a movie, a genre and the medium itself.

Dancing reveals as much as dialogue, if not more, in Titane. Over the course of Julia Ducournau’s full-throttle body horror nightmare, dancing acts as a sexual overture akin to foreplay, a key to unlock characters’ inner lives, and a visceral release of repressed emotions. Bodies come together, break, and mutate in response to outside stimuli which bring pain, pleasure or both at the same time. To dance is to after all transform the body through movement, to express oneself through choreography. Transformation is written into the film's very form, as what begins as an off-the-rails thriller about a serial killer evolves into a gut-wrenching drama about finding family.

The film’s protagonist, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), is an auto show dancer whose fetish for metal is consummated with an eager-to-consent Cadillac. She must have missed the car sex ed class on “always use protection” because she gets knocked up. Sex drives and death drives intersect as she goes off on a killing spree. On the run from cops, she usurps the identity of a young man named Adrien who has been missing for 10 years, and goes to live with Adrien’s fireman father Vincent (Vincent Lindon), who is so pleased about the reunion that he embraces the delusion even when he knows his son isn’t really his son.

Although it may set in motion Alexia's odyssey towards inner and outer transformation, the car sex isn't the most powerful moment in Ducournau’s sophomore feature. That comes much later after Alexia assumes the guise of Adrien. At the fire station that doubles as Vincent’s home and workplace, Ducournau stages a rave, where a crew of burly young firemen let off steam to pounding techno by barrelling into each other in a mosh pit like kernels in a popcorn popper. “Adrien” too is enjoying himself from the side-lines before he is pulled into the vortex of a sea of masculine aggression. The rowdier they get, the discomfort on his face becomes more discernible. This violent form of dance resembles a primal rite of passage to join their boys’ club.

The initiation enters its final stage with “Adrien” being picked up and helped onto the roof of a fire truck. Pressing for a performance, the men scream “Adrien” in unison. In the presence of the automobile, muscle memory takes over in a coming-back-to-the-body moment. Pent-up desires seep out of the skin through movement. “Adrien” begins to sway his arms and gyrate his hips to Lisa Abbott’s cover of “Wayfaring Stranger” in an erotically charged striptease. As the men watch on, joyous cheers soften into confused silence. A conflicted look of arousal and disgust descends on the faces of the hetero-bros. Their masculine angst aggravates into gender dysphoria. The tension between virility and vulnerability is palpable. It’s the kind of scene that may have been played for laughs in a Bollywood item number. But Ducournau’s intentions are to investigate the nature of gender and identity. “Adrien” doesn’t stop, even as Vincent walks in and walks away in dismay. For Alexia, all of this is foreplay. The next scene, she will have sex with the fire truck, just as she did after a similar courtship ritual to seduce the Cadillac at the film’s beginning.

Indeed, the fire truck scene acts as a counterpoint to Alexia’s introductory striptease at the auto show. Dressed in a gold bikini and fishnet stockings, she writhes sinuously on the hood of a Cadillac to The Kills’ “Doing It to Death.” The voyeuristic gaze of the camera aligns with that of the predominantly male onlookers in a reverse shot of the discomfort that “Adrien’s” striptease causes among the male onlookers in the fire truck scene. This juxtaposition allows Ducournau to scrutinise how the camera looks at women as opposed to men, while also illustrating how gender constructs lie in the eyes of the beholder.

Both Alexia and Vincent are imprisoned by gender constructs and norms. To assume the disguise of Adrien, Alexia breaks her nose, straps her breasts, and cuts her hair. To keep up the macho image of the fire captain, Vincent injects his aging body with steroids. Both are prisoners of bodies that refuse to conform to the roles required. Only by building a familial connection do the two become a little more comfortable in their skin and express themselves with a little more freedom.

The evolution of “Adrien” and Vincent’s relationship is charted through how they communicate via physicality. Vincent, frustrated by Adrien’s refusal to open up to him, plays a song to ease him up through a dance that leads to a struggle. When Vincent teaches CPR to the rhythms of “Macarena,” “Adrien” learns to breathe again, and lose some of his inhibitions. The roleplaying becomes a far less fraught pas de deux in a party (preceding the fire station rage), where Vincent and “Adrien” sway to Future Islands’ “Light House,” a scene filmed in slo-mo and soaked in pink light that accentuates a homoerotic tenderness instead of asserting a hypermasculinity. Dancing together with Vincent, Adrien feels like she is accepted.

Titane may gain most of its traction from its body horrors — and for good reason. The opening scene, which plays like a “buckle up your seat belt” PSA, is in itself a strong word of caution for the gnarly drive that lies ahead. Alexia, as a young girl, suffers a car crash that forces her to be surgically implanted with a titanium plate in her head. Things, as we know, only get gnarlier from there. But the metallic coldness belies the fleshy tenderness at the film’s core. And among its many moving parts, the motif of dancing is — without a doubt — its most well-oiled.

Titane is available for streaming on MUBI.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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