It's rare that you find a movie that seems to actively despise you, the viewer. Some examples are the Human Centipede series, Gummo, A Serbian Film, etc. Now I can add another film to that list, the intensely original and utterly baffling Titane.
The movie opens with Alexia, a young girl riding in the back of a car with her father driving. She is completely annoying from the outset,and causes an accident resulting in a titanium plate being surgically implanted in her head, causing her to have an erotic fixation with automobiles.
Next we see her (ahem) having sex with (yes, with, not in) a Cadillac and becoming pregnant. This irritates her, so she starts murdering random people including her lover and parents. Then what seems to be developing as a crime thriller shifts gears and becomes an insane love story.
Purposely changing her appearance by cutting her hair, binding her breasts and breaking her own nose, Alexia meets a fire captain mourning the loss of his son, who seems to think she is his son, or the reincarnation of his son, or something....it's confusing.
Then we get some dance sequences in the fire station that are straight out of that Simpsons episode ("Dad, why did you take me to a gay steel mill?") until ultimately our heroine gives birth to the monster car-baby thing, shattering her plate in the process and killing her. Movie over. The fire captain is happy, but the audience shakes its collective head in bewilderment.
It's audacious to present to an audience a movie without a single likeable character, but it's hard to care about what happens to anyone in this movie since everyone is loathsome to the max. The gore is less than you might think: after the murder sequences we just see Alexia oozing black fluid from various orifices (I guess that's supposed to be motor oil?)
There's a kind of hypnotic power to the random images we see in here, particularly in the first half. And I admire that I had no idea where this was headed. Ultimately though it heads nowhere, despite its efforts to the contrary. Worth a watch with lowered expectations. Out of 10: 6.7
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