Julia Ducournau: The Horror of the Female Body
Disclaimer: This article contains mild spoilers for Titane.
Shocking, revolutionary, disgusting, French director Julia Ducournau’s latest horror movie Titane, released earlier this year, has been deemed by many as the wildest movie of the year, with over a dozen audience members reportedly fainting or walking out during its screening at the Sydney Film Festival. To synopsize the movie in a most lurid way: the film follows a disturbed woman who has sex with a car and gets pregnant. And there is a lot of nudity.
Before this Palme d’Or winning movie, Ducournau has written and directed two other independent films, a short Junior (2011) and feature Raw (2016); both have also won awards at Cannes Film Festival. Junior depicts a girl whose body goes through a bizarre metamorphosis during puberty while Raw follows a young vegetarian starting veterinarian school who gets a taste of meat for the first time and starts developing cravings (hint: there’s cannibalism).
Often incorporating themes of gender, family, and sexuality, Ducournau’s films have been considered of the body horror genre, while also mixing together other genres such as coming of age, thriller, and drama. She is known for graphic, squirm-inducing gore with a strong fascination for flesh, and she isn’t afraid to show exactly the abnormal transformations that her characters go through. Her camera direction is an unflinching, unforgiving eye that doesn’t turn away during the protagonists’ most painful states, and we, as audience members, have to suffer through these mystifying changes with the characters. For those that have seen her movies, many have likely wondered: are Ducournau’s works just textbook body horror movies? Are these stories pointless and shocking just for the sake of shocking? Or are they trying to get at something deeper within the human condition? Here’s what I think.
Through the peeling flesh, the severed body parts, and the feral allusions, Ducournau’s films are a liberation of the female body. Her films have progressively matured in both technical filmmaking as well as in the ages of protagonists, taking us through the developing stages of life common for a lot of women – preteen going through puberty, young adult/older teenager going to college, and adult going through pregnancy. While countless other movies have portrayed a woman’s experience in all these stages, Ducournau’s work explicitly explores how a woman’s body changes as she ages. To her, it’s disgusting, inevitable, confusing, but natural. At no point in any of her stories has Ducournau’s characters questioned whether their strange bodily change isn’t exactly what is supposed to be happening to them. In fact, at the end of Raw, the protagonist’s father reveals that her mother has the same flesh cravings as the protagonist has been experiencing, confirming that these horrifying changes are actually biological.
Still, though such processes may be natural for all humans, they feel unnatural, and it is hard for many of us to accept. Ducournau hints at a certain disconnection between the human mind and body, a separation that philosophers have pondered for centuries. However, while philosophers usually discuss this duality through death, Ducournau portrays it through living. In her films, it seems that the changes of the human body as it ages are uncontrollable and relentless in its transfigurations, with the mind often lagging behind in processing these conversions. And, unlike the mind’s smooth continuation of consciousness, with no discernible signs of progression until, one day, we self-reflect and vaguely remember how we thought so differently just a few short years ago, the changes of the human body can be easily tracked through the passage of time, with our wrinkles, stretches, and scars. In this way, Ducournau is able to create visually sickening stories of her characters fighting against all of their new, emerging urges and transformations, ignoring them, hiding them, and in its worst cases, taking to drugs and self-injury to suppress them.
In Titane, Ducournau shows an older middle-aged fireman desperately attempting to outrun the inescapable march of time, taking steroids to keep his body muscular like the young firemen he captains. It seems our minds and bodies are often at odds; we see and are consciously aware of ourselves physically changing in unfamiliar and distressing ways, and it’s horrifying that we can’t do anything to stop it. By the end of her stories though, Ducournau shows that it is only when we stop fighting against ourselves and our bodies, is there a synthesis between the unnaturalness of our minds and the biology of our body, and that these dichotomic struggles are uniquely human.
For millennia, the female body has been painted as sensual, beautiful, and graceful, but Ducournau’s art illustrates for us a new perspective of the woman’s body – a disturbing, unexplainable, forceful nature, not to be despaired or revered upon, but to be realized. Her movies bring about a contemporary exploration of the human condition, presenting it, in its most intimate ways, as daringly feminine, distressingly real, and strangely endearing.
Cover Photo by BFA/Alamy. Edited by Katrina Kwok.
