Julia Ducournau and Vincent Lindon: ‘There is before Titane and after Titane’

It’s a film in which people get murdered with hairpins. In which a character deliberately breaks their own nose by headbutting a sink. In which someone has intimate relations with a vintage Cadillac. But for some in France, the real shock of Titane, Julia Ducournau’s gleefully transgressive Cannes Palme d’Or winner, came with the casting of national treasure Vincent Lindon in a role that is worlds away from his usual screen persona.

The second feature from Ducournau (her debut was the 2016 teen-cannibal horror Raw), Titane is a bracingly extreme piece of cinema. It has made Ducournau only the second female director to win the Palme d’Or (following Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993), but to say it puts the audience through the wringer is an understatement. During the film’s Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, a reported 13 audience members fainted and several others suffered panic attacks.

But the film, which takes an entirely unsympathetic character, the serial-killing exotic dancer Alexia (played by the remarkable Agathe Rousselle) and somehow coaxes the audience to find sympathy for her, is not just a hollow piece of provocation. It is the bold, confrontational work of a supremely skilled director who takes the trolling, gross-out thrills of body horror and uses them to challenge gender roles and our assumptions about violence.

So how does Lindon fit into this? On paper, nowhere. A winner of the Cannes Best Actor award in 2015, among numerous other accolades, he is best known for bringing quiet dignity to decent working men in impassioned social-realist dramas such as The Measure of a Man and At War. His casting in Titane is as unlikely as someone stepping out of Ken Loach films to make a gross-out comedy.

When I meet the director and actor in London, Ducournau admits that the idea of subverting Lindon’s image was appealing. “He’s an actor who basically has achieved everything at this point of his career. He’s got the Cannes prize, he’s worked with a lot of huge directors. I would say that no one was expecting this from him because he’s like a landmark.”

Lindon plays Vincent Legrand, a steroid-jacking, bodybuilding fireman who is at war with his own mortality and fervently believes that Alexia, who has disguised herself as a boy, is his beloved son who went missing 10 years before. It’s partly through the unconditional bond that builds between them that we find something human in Alexia.

“When I offered him the part, I thought he would say yes, just because I knew that he wanted to play with his image,” Ducournau says. “I knew it was the right timing for him. But also, I was aware of what his audience wanted, and that was really risky because his audience is maybe not the kind that would go see my movies. But everyone in France was like: ‘Oh my God, he’s reborn.’”

Somewhat rumpled, disarming and doodling furiously as he answers, Lindon says: “She said that she needed me, and she knew it. I didn’t realise until later that I needed her too. She needed someone very grounded, very real. And I needed a movie that was completely different, that shows something that nobody knows. And to be in a modern movie, a rock and roll movie. We provide mutual service to each other.” It was, he says, a life-changing experience. “There is before Titane and after Titane. I wouldn’t be the same actor now or in the future without being in Titane.”

There’s a degree of playfulness in Ducournau’s decision to cast Lindon, the Gallic everyman, and to have him heighten the masculinity of his appearance with an extensive bodybuilding regime, in a film that launches a full-frontal assault on notions of gender.

The statuesque, intimidatingly chic Ducournau expands on the idea: “Let’s say the idea that was underlying in the script, because I do not like to write a concept. I write characters, I write a story. But the question was: does gender define us? What is gender really? Are its boundaries and controls rigid? I believe that they are way more flexible than we think. And, more than anything, is gender necessary to define someone? Obviously, I don’t think so.”

Ducournau set out to “debunk and subvert every stereotype of gender in the writing, but also in the directing”. The latter is evident in the way that she scrupulously avoids any discernible difference in the way male and female bodies are photographed in the film.

But while Ducournau dismisses gender as “irrelevant — it’s not something that says anything about us, all it does is limit”, she does concede that there is a trend towards a particular approach when it comes to female genre and horror filmmaking. “I think it’s very interesting to see that there is a specificity of female filmmakers as far as this realm is concerned, because the horror comes from the inside with women, whereas when men approach it, it’s an outside threat that you have to fight against. In female horror, the horror is within yourself.”

That certainly holds true for both of Ducournau’s films, particularly Raw, which, with its story of a student vet who develops a craving for human flesh, can be viewed as a twisted meditation on eating disorders.

It’s an approach that she puts down to the female experience of being scrutinised by “pretty much every male around, whether it’s to criticise the way you raise your child, the way you dress, your weight, your boobs, you name it. I think that somehow it created a violence.”

Ducournau comes to the gender debate armed with a metal hairpin and a whole armoury of cinematic shock tactics. But she is at pains to point out that she is not a “provocateur”, a term from which she visibly recoils. There is an important distinction, she says, between challenging the audience and goading it.

“I think it’s important to provoke a reaction or to provoke debate through art. It’s something that implies a dialogue. It’s a two-way street. Provocation, though, is a one-way street. It’s just for your own pleasure. Let’s say that I do not like the noun, but I like the verb.”

Controversy is perhaps inevitable with a film as visceral as Titane — the latest focused on the unexpected decision of France’s Centre National du Cinéma to submit it as France’s contender for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. The debate will continue, although it may be limited to those audience members who manage not to faint.

In UK cinemas from December 26

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