Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critics’ Book: Tsugua’s Diaries, Titane

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Tsugua’s diaries

This year’s Cannes films (especially the best) have been prone to metafiction, demonstrating and examining the process of making films, creating images, writing and rehearsing scenes, or editing sound, bringing the creative process into focus. full screen. It’s not a new trend in art cinema, do what you know, love, and experience, and your livelihood is bound to bleed somehow, but self-reflexivity. is clearly in fashion, and Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiros structure, faux-puzzle-making movie Tsugua’s Diaries are perhaps the most exemplary case. True to his title, diaristic Tsugua fictitiously dramatizes his own production, which disintegrates after a violation of health and safety protocol. On the 22nd day we start with an enigmatic view of three Portuguese thirtysomethings (Crista, Carloto and Joo) having fun with Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons 1972, Nordic soul hit The Night in a rural chalet. As in most of Gomess’ work, there is an anti-narrative attitude to the way information is conveyed; characters are introduced timidly, in media res, pretty bodies in grainy compositions featuring conflicts whose motivations can only be suggested. The image and the tone are dreamlike, filtered in green then purple then magenta, while the characters repeat monologues in the presence of each other within the same scene. Worsening viewers’ cognitive instability, Tsugua (i.e. beloved August spelled backwards) progresses from her opening streak backwards through day 21, then the 20, 19 and so on, revealing the consequences and resolutions before action.

While Christopher Nolan and Gaspar No have used similar vanities to unveil their accounts of false initial premises, Gomes and Fazendeiro have more relaxed and material interests. They linger, for example, on a pair of quinces in (de) composition for three weeks, the methodical (dis) assembly of a butterfly greenhouse and the cleaning of a filthy swimming pool. The unknowns abound, keeping our curiosities afloat, as if the director couple feared that psychology would overload the debates and betray the truth of the situation they represent. The emotional axis of the fiction would seem to depend on Carloto and Cristas’ doomed romance, but this is compromised when their date 11 date appears to be included in order to develop their arcis quickly hijacked by a complaining man. that Carloto wears his socks without permission. There is a utopian bliss in the directionless, self-sufficient world these characters make for themselves, a world that the film itself wants to be a part of. As Tsugua gets closer and closer to his true beginning, the reintroduction of bodies, leadership, and protocols is deliberately oppressive, then ludicrous. (Gomes, playing himself, hopping in the back of a tractor that he impulsively decides to include in his film in the film, is quite endearing.) Without too much to describe, the production of the 2020 films ensures that the pandemic has a significant impact presence, and it indeed comes closest to giving shape to a trajectory that would be rather shapeless. In our return to something like normalcy, Tsugua suggests an alternative where we could enjoy freedoms out of order.

By now, unfortunate comparisons between Julia Ducournaus Titanium and the work of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg (especially his 1996 JG Ballard adaptation, Crash) are rife. Yes, Ducournau is unequivocally a fan (she cited him with Lynch as her two major influences), the commonalities are largely cosmetic and threaten to dampen the agenda of more clearly queer films. In truth, if I were forced to bring Titanium into conversation with any particular filmmaker’s work, I might find Tarantino and his cool brand of male violence much more generative, namely his stabbing at feminism in Kill. Bill (2003/2004) who undoubtedly inspired Titanes Shes Not There needle drop and especially the mechanophile Death Proof (2007). Ducournaus’ film revolves around Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), whose sexual attraction to cars drives the stories. The film opens with a prologue in which she has a titanium plate installed in her skull after barely surviving a horrific car crash she caused by endlessly vrooming in the backseat, sending her irascible father ( Bertrand Bonello in an inspired cast) and his car in free fall. Very tall, Alexia works as one of the star dancers of an automobile-themed burlesque, where she courts the newcomer of the club, Justine (Garance Marillier, leader of Ducournaus’ first film, Raw). Outside of work, she also murders people with hairpicks and indulges in lustful sex with a decked out lowrider covered in flame decals.

In favor of Titanes, Ducournau favors the compulsive decision-making of the characters and the propulsive momentum of his stories towards realism or any notion of credibility. This is a ostentatiously muscular production, and it draws our attention, among other stylistic choices, to its handful of expansive, showy tracking shots that meander through dense, crowded spaces; a sound mix with the bass composed well over 10; and the brutal and surprisingly visceral displays of violence inflicted on so many human torsos and facial wounds that, significantly, are rarely, if ever, transmitted from man to woman. Dialectic abounds, as a woman secretes black motor oil through a myriad of orifices, and an enraged man longs to maternally nourish anyone, anyone, the one who will pass himself off as his wife. child as machine, man as mother, cultural threads crossed for both provocation and poetics. Titanium is an extremely well-crafted film that I found both youthful and exceptionally invigorating. If that sounds radical, it’s because these kind of images and ideas, as made by a creator of the genre Ducournaus, have so far not gotten that kind of funding and commitment. studio.

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