She doesn't speak, which drives insane, but he's not going to monologue like continuously to her, which would be annoying for everyone. If you're thinking about Vincent and Alexia and Adrien, they can't talk together. It's not like I planned to do a dance film about dance-it was just for the characters. Because when you watch someone dance, somehow you feel this kind of immediate body empathy, where your body also wants to move a little bit. So it's a very nice way to instigate dialogues between my characters without having to put words on them and also to create an immediacy with the audience. So it made sense for me to hire the same person to choreograph these two very resonant scenes.ĭancing obviously is incredibly important in that film because, for one, we don't have much dialogue in the film. So she's both a masculine and feminine or none of it at all, and just being her own creature. It made sense because both of these dances kind of echo each other with the character evolution that we've seen in between, and how the first choreography is actually transcended by the one on the truck at the end.Īt the end you have the same, let's say, form of dance, the same form of choreography, but it's such a moment where the character is actually fully complete and completely transcends the gender that she's been put into at any part of the film.

She choreographed that and also the dance on the truck at the end. I really enjoyed working with her cause I was dancing as well in rehearsals. We worked with a pole dancer that is super famous in Europe called Doris Arnold, who did an amazing job. I mean, that was a huge part of the film. This leads me to the choreography of the film. She also does this through her choreography, which is incredible in its ownership of the car and of all the representations that are linked to cars in general. And I think that when we get to Alexia, she actually reclaims the power of the gaze, by looking through the lens and looking directly at you, so that you're not looking at her, she's looking at you. Obviously it means that the gaze sexualizes the dancers. Somehow the fact that I try to somehow mimic the male gaze at the start. What made you decide to start the story with the two women, Alexia and Justine, dancing at the car show? And in the case of Virginie Despentes for a very long time. I think reclaiming the narrative and taking over the male gaze is something that a lot of women artists are interested in right now. This was not at all something that I thought about when I did this scene.

Julia Ducournau: No, although I really love Virginie Despentes as a writer. The first killing of the man who follows Alexia from work made me think of Virginie Despentes and their reclaiming of the narrative, you know Baise-moi and all of these kinds of movies. Stephanie LaCava: I'd like to talk a little bit about the exotic dancing portrayed on the cars in the beginning. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. We talked about choreography, the inescapable sway of Virginie Despentes and Claire Denis, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Ducournau became the second female director after Jane Campion to win the Palme d’Or.ĭucournau spoke to me over Zoom earlier this week from Los Angeles while I was in her native Paris. Titane, the story of a sociopathic woman who has a titanium plate put into her head after a childhood accident, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this telltale summer. This is the new-new, in theaters a few seats away from the bodies of others. Unnervingly affective, both of Ducournau’s films present a radical tenderness. Films about connection, the repulsion-body horror-is only what fixes you to the screen. It’s a little too easy to add this and the French director/screenwriter’s latest Titane to the long list of movies known as both cinema du corps or New French Extremity (the term coined by Artforum critic James Quandt nearly two decades ago). Julia Ducournau’s first feature Raw (2016) told the story of a young woman named Justine studying to be a veterinarian, faced with her own taste for flesh.

Julia ducournau film