 Yeah, I don't know how to enter this one My body Hurts and it it has for a long time In my freshman year of college both of my wrists gave out it. It's a strange thing going from drumming and karate and writing and gaming to Suddenly finding the act of gripping a particularly heavy fork full of food at times too painful to bear I was fortunate in that professors allowed me to delay certain assignments or lowered required page counts on essays because The difference between 10 pages of typing in 15 could now be measured by the physical toll it took During my first winter break. I forced myself to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout because it requires less movement than QWERTY Also during that winter break I went to see Tron Legacy at the IMAX Theater in the Providence Place Mall Decided I needed to use the restroom right as the movie started Maybe I just wanted to get away from weirdly de-aged Kurt Russell and ran down the stairs a few at a time On the bottom step hit something wrong collapsed and ended up on crutches When I got back to campus where I lived in the third floor of a building with no elevator The ankle healed my wrists were temporarily addressed by wrappings that made me feel better While convincing everyone else I had just failed to unalive myself Eventually I got surgeries different ones for each because although the issues cropped up at the same time They had totally different causes ligament tore here and Attendant came loose here and was wearing itself out over my bone But I didn't really understand why I had to massage the scars and stretch and all of that stuff in the weeks after the surgeries I was young and sad and in pain It was never properly explained that if scar tissue was allowed to form it would hurt forever Whoops But that's just life right what doesn't kill you it makes you stronger But maybe not physically maybe not when you have to wear an elbow bracer an ebracer only use backpacks Because your messenger bags hurt my back in a way that the symmetrical weight from dual straps just don't Life is pain Maybe you grow from it or maybe it grows in you Hello by the way and welcome to the week air of you you can call me bad itself care and today I am talking about Julia Ducar now's sophomore feature titan Now to say I was excited for this movie would be a severe understatement the majority of Ducar now's debut 2016 is raw Is one of my favorite movies of the last 10 years? I have mentioned my affinity for coming-of-age stories about teenage girls something that is already Very weird to say and is going to be a whole lot weirder once I turn 30 But I promise it's innocuous and mostly just confusing as well as highly stylized ultra-violent cinematic experiences Like if assassination nation is my favorite movie, how could raw not be up there? The real reason is that I don't like the ending which feels like a punchline to a joke I didn't know was being set up and I didn't particularly enjoy on its own nor feel benefited the message of the film But what precedes that frustrating closer is visceral and beautiful and just Excited the hell out of me for what one would hope to be a long fruitful career for its writer-director But as is so often the case it was quite some time before I heard her name again This past June actually when her latest was announced as part of cans lineup I ignored all the descriptions and marketing and knew fuck all about what the film was other than the opinions of some Friends who'd seen it in Europe where it had premiered earlier or at press screenings over here and feelings were mixed And that was useful to know I tempered my sky-high expectations somewhat and I'm glad that I did Titan is a very different film than its predecessor which isn't Inherently a bad thing but raw is so specifically up my alley that in retrospect anything very different would never hit me Specifically as hard raw is a coming-of-age tale about a girl becoming a woman and all of the figurative and literal messiness that comes with it It follows in the footsteps of Ducarna's debut short film junior Which was the first role for raw star Garance Marie-Lyé Marie-Lyé has now played a character named Justine in all three of Ducarna's films She doesn't appear to be the same Justine which leads to the possibility that there are many more Marie-Lyé Performed Justine's to come which I think would be a kind of fun directorial trademark Which follows a 13 year old girl as she goes from being a gross tomboy or whatever to a beautiful girl Who has taken off her glasses let down her hair and started shedding her skin and leaving trails of goop behind her It's a more of your typical body horror than raw Which is less about the protagonist's body being torn apart than her drive to do that to others Titan returns to the former more and continues Ducarna's tradition of making gross movies about things that happen to women's bodies But because our new protagonist Alexia has fully grown her body is no longer changing of its own accord Enter pregnancy Now if you believe the word of its director Titan is a love story I'll be at a non-traditional one a woman who has become completely Disconnected from her own humanity gets a chance at redemption thanks to a broken man It's not necessarily romantic love a little more of a found family sort of thing kind of I Don't know it's a lot how a lot well the father of her child is a car Which we see in a sequence that is not explicit But to my puritanical American eyes was pretty shockingly sexual for a while I thought that this scene was either a dream or a coping mechanism It comes shortly after Alexia fucks a dude shit up with one of those Things that like looks like a chopstick that some people used to keep their hair in place that I can't be bothered to Look up the proper name of and either it wasn't real at all or it was her way of processing a traumatic event, but No, I it went down in universe exactly as depicted, which you might imagine causes some problems It occurs to me that making things super literal is part of why I didn't like raws ending Taitan handles it better as does the whole Murder thing well, I wouldn't call it a bloodbath Taitan's first path or so features some deeply unpleasant brutality What makes it hard to watch is less the actual violence than how Long some of these people suffer the first kill I mentioned felt like it went on for Minutes as the man convulses and eventually starts foaming at the mouth and I just wanted to stream Fucking cut already. Oh my god, but also I get it because Ducar now knows that we think this dude is a creep And frankly we want him to be punished for that So at first it feels good like fuck that gross guy who believes this or any woman owes him anything and then And then it keeps going and it stops being fun And then it becomes horrifying and through it all Alexia is completely Dispassionate it is not until afterwards when she notices that some of that mouth foam had gotten on to her that she shows any reaction at all and If you think the first victim deserved it You sure won't about those to follow Here Ducar now is creating as much distance between the audience and Alexia as exists between the character and her humanity This will in theory make the redemption feel much more impactful, but That's a dangerous game to play as a storyteller because it is very easy to cross a line after which someone just doesn't care anymore No matter how much work you put into it. I'm reminded of the 10 hours I spent as Abby in the last of us part 2 after which I still wanted her exactly as dead as I did at the start All of that time in her shoes changed nothing for me And Titan probably does go a bit too far down that path for its own good I enjoyed the stylishness of the whole production enough that I never completely disconnected from it But if I really think about how I felt about Alexia after everything was said and done It wasn't much and what I do feel came primarily from first-time actor Agatha Roussell's wild performance, but if we're talking performance Vincent Landon gives one of the best I've seen in years as another guy named Vincent a fire captain who lost his young son a decade before Resulting in a divorce and then your usual depressive spiral He's also taking steroids in an effort to keep up with the youngsters on his team Things aren't great and as we meet him He has just been faced with a choice because Alexia while on the run saw photos of his missing son Adrian and decided that since she needed a place to go Why not that kid's parents? Obviously, she looks nothing like him, but she can do some things to make herself less feminine at least She shapes her head breaks her nose in another one of those excruciatingly long sequences of suffering I hated watching it and Binds her chest and belly with an ace bandage before going to the police posing as the long-lost boy and you could feel Vincent's understanding that this is not in fact his son and see the choice he makes to push forward anyway It is so subtly impactful the knowledge that he has a human-sized hole in his life And if this imposter wants to fill it, they'll do So Alexia becomes Adrian But even though she wants this second verse to be the same as the first it turns out to not be so easy and As her body bulges and tears from the thing growing in her stomach She finds herself becoming acclimated to this new world with a new father who cares far more than her actual parents ever seem to The opening scene which ends in young Alexia getting the titular titanium plate put into her skull is Fascinating because of how many different dynamics are set up so quickly and the film changes with Alexia Once she finds herself in Vincent's care the whole thing slows Way the heck down the stylized visuals are paired back and we find ourselves watching a Comparatively straightforward drama about two people becoming closer Ducornow has said that she has an existentialist approach to life believing that you have to be many in order to be one You have to go through metamorphosis to get closer to your essence and sure you will never completely reach that point But the journey is life That's what we're doing here and she reflects that in the construction of the movie as well as its contents It's another gutsy move because the change is jarring in a very different way than the violence is and I know that that transition Didn't work for everyone I'm not even really sure it worked for me so much as I just kind of accepted that it was happening and shrugged my shoulders It's where we get into seeing if Alexia can be redeemed whether Vincent's kindness and or brokenness that she's taking advantage of can get through the metaphorical titanium plate keeping her humanity locked away and This is actually pretty clever on Ducornow's part because as established Alexia is a straight-up monster I didn't really care about her whole deal But Vincent seems like a pretty good guy all things considered The initial concern that he might be trying to keep Alexia as some sort of pet quickly passes And we want her to be redeemed because quite frankly we don't want her to kill him So she needs to get better and regain her emotional humanity so that we don't have to worry so much about him Saying that out loud There's a lot to unpack and I have not read nearly enough feminist theory to do it justice. It is a little Messy and when you think about the film in terms of gender as opposed to more broadly about life It kind of starts to feel a little ugly There's been controversy around Alexia's whole stint as Adrienne and how it relates to the question of Transness because well I think it's pretty obvious that Ducornow did not set out to make a trans film certainly the idea comes to mind The most notable entry into the discourse is an article by Jude dry from Indie wire called titan twists trans tropes into perverse lifeless body horror and while the film did not hit me the way it hit her I Can't pretend like it doesn't play into that most dangerous of stereotypes gender presentation as deception used for personal gain Now I would bet a $200 donation to the transgender law center that this never occurred to Ducornow Though I made the donation just in case Because the broader reading falls apart under the barest scrutiny Alexia is not Adrienne because she feels like Adrienne or believes she is Adrienne She clearly doesn't want to be Adrienne She is doing the bare minimum to keep up the charade and as she becomes more comfortable She puts less and less effort into hiding her body when push finally comes to shove She wants to be known as herself and not her presentation I can totally understand why this would rub people the wrong way Especially given the images of her body cut up by that bandage. She's wrapped herself too tightly in But your mileage will vary I Do keep thinking about those bandages though Alexia is different from most of the monsters in body horror films in that she is not directly Changing in Tetsuo a man is rapidly being engulfed in machinery in titan The machinery is trying to escape a body that remains recognizably human throughout Virtually all body horror is ultimately about what makes someone human and at what point has someone crossed the line into something else entirely films like Tetsuo and the fly are Really blatant, but all of them grapple with it by exposing what humans are at their core meat and bone and blood When Alexia bleeds oil It made me think of how the human blood looked in the black and white Tetsuo Although what he bleeds as he transforms doesn't actually look anything like that But as we look to the future even that seems too limiting in a Q&A after the New York Film Festival premier Dukonau said all my work is about trying to ask myself What it is to be human and to broaden the spectrum of what we think humanity is is there humanity beyond the social construct And I can't think of an easier way to broaden that spectrum or make a person Contemplate those questions than to transform a body before their very eyes. It's like a magic trick human human Not so human We're all gonna draw our own lines, but where and why I'm not too interested in giving answers Dukonau added I don't think that art should give any answers whatsoever It should just raise more questions that allow you to debate afterwards internally or with others Now I've heard that a lot over the years and sometimes it feels genuine and other times sort of like a cop-out Like the artist doesn't have any answers and so the work itself isn't actually coherent because it's not grounded in anybody's reality But I don't think that's Dukonau. Her work is too Straightforward honestly at the end the plot is resolved. We know what happened So instead we are left to discuss the implications And I was surprised at how hopeful it all seemed a clear proclamation that humanity will continue that life Finds a way 6.9 out of 10 Thank you so much for watching. Thank you particularly to my patrons my mom Hammering Marco Kat Saracada Benjamin Schiff Anthony Cole Magnolia Denton Elliot Fowler Greg Lucina cojo Phil Bates Liam night Willow. I am the sword Raleigh Zimmerman Jacob Alexander and the folks who'd rather be read than said If you liked this video, that's great If not oh well if you want to see more, please subscribe. Hope to see in the next one