Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Titane
2021 · Julia Ducournau · Titane on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the opening shot thread through the car expo without cutting. (camera)
Impens prowls between hoods and engine bays, moving with the crowd, and arrives at Alexia dancing on a flame-painted car. The take refuses to cut away from her, and the camera is as interested in the metal as in the body on it.
Payoff: Before a word is spoken you are told the film's terms, which are flesh actively seeking out machine rather than performing for a crowd.
Look at the reds and the cold blue-white of the lights. (light)
Impens works a hard, saturated, metallic palette. Fire-engine red, sodium orange, and the clinical fluorescence of bathrooms and corridors. Skin is lit to look like a surface rather than like a person.
Payoff: The color scheme puts flesh and metal in the same register, so the film's central fusion is already in the light.
Listen for creaking metal mixed in with the sounds of bodies. (sound)
The design keeps engines, groaning steel and wet organic noise in the same mix. Jim Williams scores between menacing drone and full lyrical strings, so the body horror keeps swelling into something closer to romance.
Payoff: The soundtrack insists on the mechanical and the organic being one thing, which the dialogue never has to say.
Look at how the camera treats chrome, hoods and hydraulics. (setting)
Cars are photographed as animate and desirable: paint jobs, bodywork, the motion of a suspension.
Payoff: A machine is given the charge a person usually carries. In the reading: fetish. An object charged with compulsive force that the film keeps circling is what the reading calls a fetish.
Count how many lines Alexia actually speaks. (performance)
Rousselle had never acted in a feature. She plays almost the whole part through posture, gaze and endurance, and the film gives her very little to say. Lindon answers with a hulking frame he is remaking by injection.
Payoff: Meaning is carried by two bodies under stress, so you read the film the way you read a person across a room. In the reading: cinema of the body. Flesh under strain carrying what speech cannot is what the reading calls a cinema of the body.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: The body does the talking. Alexia barely speaks, so watch posture, skin and how she moves through a room.