HOT WHEELS
When Titane arrived at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it skidded to a halt on the Croisette like a muscle car tearing up the tarmac. The brains behind it? French director Julia Ducournau, who had already shocked the film world with her 2016 cannibalistic debut Raw. Even Titane’s trailer was an intense mini-masterpiece, making it look like a neon-strobed blend of David Cronenberg’s Crash, the Fast And The Furious franchise and American Psycho. And when critics saw the full feature, opinions were divided over this transgressive body-horror tale laden with controversy and cult appeal. Declared ‘Cronenbergian gynaeco-Gothic’, ‘toweringly pointless’, ‘stroboscopic aggressive’ and ‘an oil-slicked, neon-drenched, gender-and-fender-bending vroom-gasm of a movie’; by the end of the fest, Titane had triumphed against the odds, winning the Palme d’Or.
Awarded by the Spike Lee-headed jury, Ducournau, 37, became only the second woman ever to take Cannes’ top prize, after Jane Campion 28 years earlier with The stars of were shocked, and taken aback. “If somebody has told], I would have said to him, ‘You’re fucking crazy. You’re out of your mind,’” exclaims Vincent Lindon, the veteran French thesp who previously won Cannes’ Best Actor for
