"Titane" and "I'm Your Man"

Let's get foreign and weird.

"Titane" won the Palme D'Or at Cannes last year for Julia Ducournau, and it's the wildest feature to have won the award in recent memory.  Frankly, just trying to describe this thing is a challenge.  Let's call it a fable about a woman named Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), who is wired differently from the norm.  As a child she's involved in a car accident that leaves her with a metal plate in her head, a gnarly scar over her ear, and an attraction to cars.  She's also deeply misanthropic, and her violent behavior as an adult forces her to go on the run.   Eventually, she deceives her way into the life of an aging fire department captain, Vincent (Vincent Adrien), who offers unconditional love, and she finally learns to connect to another human being.

Due to fear of spoilers, I'm leaving out a lot of strange, unsettling elements of body horror, mostly related to Alexia's relationship to cars - maybe she is a machine herself, or becoming one.  There are also some disturbingly visceral incidents of violence, including sexual violence, in the first half that lead me to believe that the story was leading somewhere very different from where it ended up going.  Ducournau is fantastic at juggling tones and emotional states, and I was constantly steeling myself for more unpleasantness at every turn.  Like her last film, "Raw," the way she juxtaposes her heroine's monstrousness with her vulnerability is so striking.  There's an unusual intensity to the way Alexia's body is used in particular.  We see her naked form constantly, sometimes sexualized, sometimes the source of violence and horror, sometimes a symbol of potent, uncontrollable power.  

Agathe Rousselle's performance is the main event, one that is heavily physical and often silent.  She broods and glowers and is able to transform and contort herself into very different forms.  You can read so many things into Alexia's struggle - gender issues, mental health problems, and a whole can of worms about female sexuality and motherhood.  I often have trouble connecting to the work of the more extreme European directors, like Gaspar Noe and Claire Denis, who use similar images of violence, nudity, and alienation.  With "Titane," however, there's also a tenderness and an empathy that comes through in even the most brutal frames, and I found myself connecting with Alexis almost in spite of myself.

Now, over to Germany and "I'm Your Man," Maria Schrader's lovely, low-key new science-fiction film.  An archaeologist, Anna (Maren Eggert), is recruited to test out a new android who has been designed to be her perfect romantic partner.  This is Tom (Dan Stevens), a talkative, unfailingly pleasant character who is determined to integrate himself fully in Anna's life, though Anna is stubbornly resistant to the idea.  She doesn't have any interest in romance and is deeply suspicious of Tom and all that he represents.  However, as she interacts more with Tom, and shares more about her life and circumstances, the situation becomes more complex.

We've seen plenty of media about human beings and their relationships with robots in recent years, mostly genre projects that involve the robots standing in for exploited and subjugated groups.  What's interesting about "I'm Your Man" is that it actually grapples with the themes of humanity's relationship with technology head-on.  Dan Stevens' performance is showy and exaggerated, playing Tom as cheerfully inhuman and eager to be the most perfect boyfriend ever, with a bag of tricks that are fun to see brought out, one by one.  And it takes a while to realize that grumpy Anna is actually the far more interesting character.  As she's tempted by the companionship offered by Tom, it begins to feel more and more curious why she resists, and resists so strongly.  Untangling the reasons for her hostility and mistrust take up most of the film, and in the end the story is more about Anna's humanity than Tom's.

And I think that's why I appreciate "I'm Your Man" so much.  It's small scale, intimate and empathetic, committed to being a film about relationships and difficult feelings in spite of its flashy robots and holograms.  Tom turns out to be a foot in the door to get us acquainted with Anna, with her life and her responsibilities.  She's one of the most admirable leads of any science fiction film I've seen in a while, and Maren Eggert does great work in the part.  And it's nice to know that I can still be surprised by a film like this, one that looks so familiar, but has unexpected depths.      

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