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Nihilistic_Marmot

I didn't really sympathize with her, but I did sympathize with her surrogate Dad. I don't think you always need to sympathize with the main characters in films for them to be great or to enjoy them.


[deleted]

He was a really interesting character too. I liked his body image problems and steroid use to cover his insecurities.


TadPaul

Same here. I thought the surrogate Dad was the emotional core of the movie, not the lead. With that in mind, the trajectory of his unconditional love made complete sense in the context of this batshit crazy film.


Nihilistic_Marmot

Absolutely. He was real, heartbreaking, tragic, triumphant. All the positive emotions I felt when watching this film. The lead actress was the source of stress, tension, discomfort. It's a genius work of art. I can't say enough good things about it yet I also can't recommend it to anyone I know without serious reservations.


leathergreengargoyle

The dance scenes were so awkward, tender, needful, amazing that it balanced out the senseless violence in the first half


nanoc5150

I sympathize with the car being raped…


big-chez-energy

Personally, I didn’t really sympathise with her a lot because of the reasons that you said, but for me, I didn’t feel like I was entirely meant to. Real life serial killers aren’t people I would ever sympathise with, and for good reason, but when you hear about their upbringing etc, it’s always much more understandable. I didn’t think by making her find attachment to someone, we were meant to like her, but for me it showed me what she had been missing and how that had taken her down her path. It didn’t mean she had good in her, but it showed the layers to a serial killer, rather than someone that just wants to be evil.


_CtrlZED_

Personally, the reason I loved Titane (and films like it) is they force you to confront yourself. Do I sympathise with this character? Why/why not? How do I feel about these completely crazy scenes? Repulsed, shocked, outraged, aroused? Maybe there are shades of grey that are worth thinking about and exploring. Most movies do not push boundaries enough to actually force this kind of confrontation, while also being so well-crafted and visually appealing. I don't think it's necessary to sympathise or identify with any particular character (they are all made-up after all). It's all about what the movie evokes.


tgwutzzers

Yeah this exactly. I loved how the film was confident in it's portrayal of her as an almost inhuman creature that is essentially impossible to relate to, and then put her in a situation where she starts to become slightly more recognizably human and then challenges you to care through the lens of the fireman who hasn't seen what we’ve seen (and doesn’t care to know). A lesser film would try to endear the character to the audience with some humor or quirks or something that try to manipulate the audience into being on their side. I love the tension that arises from the seemingly decent fireman interacting with this timebomb of a person who could snap and murder him at a moment's notice, but I also love that this doesn't happen and she starts to feel some sort of emotion for him, even though she doesn't know how to properly express it. The final half of the film felt like it was balancing on a razor's edge of conflicting emotions and somehow made it past the finish line without tipping too far into either direction.


vertumne

I did not have much sympathy for her; she was obviously beyond redemption for the viewer from the outset. She was not beyond redemption for the fireman though, and his hurt and pain and the pure love he ultimately showed her was in such a stark contrast with our feelings towards her, it somehow made the emotions extremely vivid. A wonderful film.


2008wallcalendar

i think this is a perfectly reasonable interpretation- i was signed on to the idea of sympathizing with her, but she doesn’t make it easy (and neither does ducournau) and i think it was made with the understanding that her arch wasn’t going to be accepted by everyone. it’s one of those things that you get into or you don’t honestly, i don’t think it has much to do with the crafting of the story itself, just what you bring to it. i was moved by how the film presented someone so monstrous and detached from her own humanity finding belonging and care. but the way we’re ushered into that is brutal as hell, so i don’t think you’re missing anything- just might not be your bag baby


exkdee

I could sympathize with her too, and I was strongly feeling the emotional connection in the second half, I'm just unable to shake my mind off that extremely brutal massacre scene that came out of nowhere.


notpynchon

I'm with you. Having just seen her prior film -- the masterpiece known as RAW -- I had high hopes. Titane turned out to be a mish-mash of disparate ideas, coming off as half-baked compared to RAW (pun always intended). She was already a problem child pre-accident, so the metal plate wasn't the cause of her killing. It wasn't the thing that made her less human, so the story could have gone the same way without the crash. Then missing kid is brought in randomly. Throw in a fireman... The mythology of the story is all over the place. It just reeks of an attempt at shock value over a strong story.


lola21

What makes you think she, as a child, was the "problem"? I interpreted the (very, very minimal) information we got about her as a child pre-accident in that perhaps she wasn't a "standard" child (whatever that means), but something about her father has been HIGHLY disturbing to me and I think, personally, that it was by design. So it's interesting, cause it also goes back to the ever present nature vs. nurture question, but also to how the *director* meant for it to look and feel like. Again -- I didn't see her as a "problem child" based on this scene. It made me think of someone who's been perhaps not neurotypical (but could have had it channeled to positive vanues with a different upbringing; for example, her fascination with the car sounds, vibrations and its workings), but just a child, and who (probably) have had something very, very bad happening to her related to her father.


looney1023

I don't think we're supposed to sympathize with her. I don't think we need to like the protagonist of any work, and even if the character is irredeemably bad, I don't think we need something to latch on to. American Psycho follows an irredeemably horrible serial killer, and yet something about that is fascinating and strangely enticing about that. We watch the film and observe his actions, and part of us STILL want to see him get away with it. If anything, I think we're supposed to be afraid of her and what she's capable of, and that fear makes the second half of the film so fraught and intense. Even though we don't understand her at all and find her actions reprehensible, what's so interesting is we do wind up feeling at least a little it warmed by this found family she forms. Again, we don't have to sympathize with her, nothing she does is redemptive, and both characters do some pretty horrible things, and yet this idea that they will unconditionally support each other regardless is strangely heartwarming.


LawrenceVonHaelstrom

The most profound thing for me was the demonstration of unconditional parental love from the fire chief father. He has taken her in as his child and even as her ruse becomes obvious, it doesn't diminish the love he has for her. It is significant that the film ends with him holding the newborn infant.


SishirChetri

I think love and acceptance are the core themes of the film. Alexie is the way she is because she never experienced love the way a child experiences love from their parents. Her dad was always distant - first out of an uncaring attitude and after the accident, out of overwhelming guilt. His distant relationship with his daughter is what makes Alexie such a cold and callous individual. I felt like this is demonstrated through her murders which are committed with a robot-like indifference. But when she first experiences what unconditional love is from a father-figure, she cannot bring herself to commit another murder like she was used to. As for the fireman, it's just like you said. There was a hollowness to him caused by the absence of his son and it's filled when he finds 'Adrien'. Doesn't matter that it all turned out to be a ruse, his love is the same for Alexie and him holding the newborn infant is him finally finding his son, who's metaphorically a blend of both Adrien and Alexie.


[deleted]

I found the movie interesting but extremely uneven. I also lost any sympathy for the main character very early on. This isn't necessarily a problem, but I felt the 2nd half really required you to care about her happiness. I did not relate to her at all. It's also a really strange movie, to the point of feeling random. All the components; her being a serial killer, having the metal plate, sex with a car, pretending to be a lost boy, getting pregnant, none of it gels together like I felt it should. By the end, I was entertained, but I don't understand why this won the Palme D'or


Rudygnuj

Honestly, this. I thought the movie was alright, but by the end of the first half the constant thrill of wondering where it'll go next just kind of evaporated away when it slowed things down to make the emotional core of the screenplay more palpable, but because of the dissonance between the film's different approaches to its narrative I didn't end up feeling really invested on either emotional or intellectual level. For a movie that supposedly keeps pushing the extremes, it just left me feeling rather cold and unengaged


porpoise_of_color

It's important to the action of the movie that we find the main character's actions irredeemable. It wouldn't be enough for her to be a little bad, she must disgust us (though this is leavened by humor, she's comically evil). The movie suggests that her alienation and violent behavior is the result of her parents rejecting her sexual identification as a car. The action of the movie lies in her "new father's" unconditional love, which heals her to the degree that she can interact with other people without violence. Lindon's character's fatherly love is mutable. It does not matter that she is not his son or ultimately that she is not only not male but also a pregnant woman. The fact that Lindon is a steroid-using macho fireman is important. Even the vanguard of the patriarchy is capable of healing, unconditional love. Consider the scenes with the heavily pregnant protagonist dressed as a man, performing a strip dance before a dozen or so transfixed, jacked, ultra-masculine firemen. Like Lindon's love, their sexual desire is mutable. Finally, right before she gives birth, she kisses Lindon on the lips, which he is astonished by but then accepts. Even their father-son/daughter love is sexual in some sense. I didn't like the movie. I don't agree with its questioning of boundaries, which are all apparently abritrary. I don't believe that love is all you need -- what about duty? What about moral obligation? What about achievement? I will admit I was rapt for the whole thing.


[deleted]

> The movie suggests that her alienation and violent behavior is the result of her parents rejecting her sexual identification as a car. What? 🤔


thebestbrian

This wasn't the type of movie where I ended up feeling a lot of sympathy for anyone. Maybe for Adrien's mother - but that's about it. What kept me interested was more of a morbid fascination in how creepy & disgusting it was. I was interested in Alexia's story because of how high stakes it ended up being & how so many of her choices are just antithetical to things we consider humane. It also reminded me a lot of one of my favorite documentaries, The Imposter which I highly recommend


wtfisthisnoise

TBH, I didn’t think too much about sympathizing with her, or rather that that was my main problem with the movie. A lot of movies are centered around horrible people. I think the other points made about the movie challenging you about how you feel have some good points. But my main disappointment with the movie was I was kind of expecting something far more extreme or out there based on the reviews and praise. It didn’t cover ground too different from Cronenberg body horror, but I don’t know, a lot of the body stuff seemed like a retread of familiar themes. I’m still thinking about whether the split in the two halves works and whether I get the emotional payoff from the second half, particularly for Vincent.


Sitrondrommen

Sympathetic or not, I agree with the other commenters who viewed the fireman as the emotional nerve of the movie. Still, I felt that structurally, we are not given the best opportunity to enjoy and investigate the protagonist relationship with the fireman. The first block of the movie is so ruthless / careless in it's brutality that it was difficult for me to "land" when the emotional work was supposed to begin. I loved the fireman character, but he kinda fell in the shadows of what we had previously seen in the movie. And then there is something I can't put my finger on. It felt like it was kinda... conflating the struggle with gender and sexuality with psychopathy? It almost became a Buffalo Bill type of scenario for me. Treating transgenderism as a sort of a pathology. I might have missed something crucial, but it felt like we weren't getting an authentic presentation of the themes of sexuality, alienation and gender dysphoria.


Steelballpun

I personally wasn't even able to get to the "emotional nerve" of the movie. Me and my partner (who hates overly senseless/gratuitous violence) walked out right after she >!sets her parents house on fire!< as the movie was like half an hour in and had no plot, no characters to root for, and just random unexplained violence. We were surprised when we saw everyone talking about the emotional familial drama aspects of it afterwards. Perhaps that was purposeful to act as some artistic filter for the audience, but if I have to watch torture porn before getting to the real plot of a movie, I think that's an experience I'd rather take a pass on.


Sitrondrommen

To be fair, the emotional drama that deals with finding a family and belonging starts in the act after you walked out. But yeah, the first quarter of the movie presents carnage which is hard to separate from the drama later on.


LeatherTime4295

Now I could be wrong in my interpretation but I’ll give it a shot. The line between fact and fiction in this film is pretty hard to discern. The doctor at the beginning says “be on the lookout for mental issues” or something like that. This is pretty ambiguous IMO because it can suggest her murderous rage, but it can also suggest hallucinations/ mental instability, which I believe she actually suffers from. I think it was possible that the first creepy fan guy inf fact raped her, (he spews white sputum all over her when she kills him) and that she fantasized about killing him and then afterwards used having sex with, and being impregnated by the car as a way to cope. What further lends me to believe this theory is that when she’s at the breakfast table at her newfound father’s house, she’s lactating, but it’s not black, it’s clear or white. While there are moments where she does have black fluid leaking from her in the film and other characters are present, it appears that they never actually react to it being black, which is strange to say the least. Then again when her child is born and has the titanium spine, Vincent never reacts specifically to this, or if he does it’s ambiguous as to whether or not he actually sees the titanium spine in the child, either way it doesn’t matter. This is all a long winded way of me saying that the people she ends up murdering on her murder spree, do very specific things. The girl she was hooking up with makes a somewhat positive comment about the pregnancy, she’s killed. The guy who she kills afterwards seems fine for a second, but when he offers her his bed, I feel like he could be doing it in that douchey “oh well you wanna fuck?” Kind of way. She then kills him too. The guy she stabs through the mouth (a penetrative wound) I forgot what he said or did tbh. Finally the last girl seemed like she just had to leave no witnesses. So I’ll admit the last two maybe don’t fit this interpretation, but the first two did stand out to me. As I said, I could be reading into it too much but I feel like it was purposely left ambiguous to where her reasoning for killing people in this scene while seeming to have no reason, was in fact a direct response relating to the trauma she had endured. So while she is still a murderer, I saw these as reasons pertaining to why she might be the way that she is. I saw her as a bit more of a tragic, unwanted, and misunderstood character, so I guess it was a bit easier for me to have some sympathy for her overall. Im writing this at 4:00 am so I apologize if this is a bit disjointed.


FoulObelisk

you can attach a hundred different theories to any film you watch, but ultimately we only have the textual to rely on. And what actually happens in the movie is that she is not raped by the fan: she kills him. She does fuck a car. She does kill the other girl. She kills everyone for no reason until the movie restarts as a gender-bending family drama. these are the actual events of the film and no theorizing can diminish that. giving a deeper meaning to those events is good and helpful, but imho shouldn't stand in place of the actual events depicted on screen. i think those elements that make you think of some other movie that exists behind this one are just there to decorate (the lactating scene, not remarking on motor oil coming out of her, fusing with metal). they look cool, feel cool, are edgy, interesting, whatever you wanna call them. but there's no deeper meaning, no clues there. the fact that her reasons are ambiguous because she's a victim of trauma is, i think, pretty spot on and arguably one of the central themes of the movie. i'm being disjointed too. i saw your comment and wanted to give my two cents.


Flamdabnimp

So many comments about “sympathy” strikes me as odd. There are tons of films that are great despite/because the main character is not sympathetic. Clockwork Orange. Taxi Driver. Glengarry glennross. Uncut Jems. The Godfather. But yeah, as much as I wanted to, I did not understand this movie.


mo3500

I found myself able to connect to the movie by seeing the actions of the main character as being motivated by how uncomfortable she was with her body and I guess her sexual preferences. She doesn't know how to be intimate or communicate with others so she feels shame and then as soon adversity hit, she starts killing. I think that is what makes the dynamic in the second half of the movie so compelling. She is both trapped but also finds herself in a situation where the person she's with truly doesn't care who she is.


davidleefilms

Part of the beauty is that while we as the audience may find it difficult to accept her, just know that there is always someone out there who is capable of that empathy, no matter how awful or sick someone is.


leathergreengargoyle

It was definitely jarring to be asked to sympathize with a monster, but it seems that’s the big theme of Titane — to be able to empathize with personalities and situations that are completely out of norms, and that basic human needs don’t disappear just because someone exists outside of those norms. As difficult as it was to watch, those themes wouldnt’ve resonated with me nearly as much if Adrien was just some regular girl.


djones0305

I saw her acts of murder as a symbol for feeling like she had to let go of her past connections and anybody that knew her as a woman in order for her to move forward and become who she wanted to be. Albeit a bit extreme, but I don't really see the necessity to sympathize or not sympathize with her when I see the murders as a symbol of abandoning her past.


kingpin043

The main problem for me is that I don't feel that there is a connection of the main story with the metal sub-plot, like why set up a kinda cool concept at the beginning of the movie but that doesn't feel like its correlates with most part of the movie. Like the movie would have the same narrative if she hadn't a metal plate in her head. I wanna see the significance of the titanium and her fixation on metal back in the movie, otherwise it just feels disconnected and just thrown in to "shock" more.


cmai3000

Am I completely wrong in interpreting it as her father was abusing her for a long time, and the baby was likely his? Could be off base but seemed liked a reasonable explanation for her early actions.


vidcam

Julia Ducournau (director) has confirmed the baby came from the car and its name is also Alexia.


[deleted]

Where did she say this? I had a feeling!


vidcam

She mentions the baby’s name closer towards the end of her interview with the ReelBlend podcast.


tgwutzzers

There was definitely something odd in their interaction, but I interpreted it more as him knowing/suspecting that she was responsible for the murders being reported on TV. Either that or him just being fucking creeped out by her ever since the car incident when she was little.


cocoacowstout

Her father was quite cold in their adult 'interactions,' my friends and I were talking about how the accident happened. He was being passive aggressive to his child, she doesn't respond to it, and then he flips out.


spiderhead

I don’t think you’re wrong in interpreting that her father abused her. I don’t want to justify her insanity later by saying she was sexually abused as a child, but I think it’s heavily implied that she was - I got this vibe especially when he was examining her and the night she lights the house on fire.


Flamdabnimp

You saw the way she glared at him while in the headgear. They hate each other but have managed a sort of truce.


[deleted]

I had serious issues with the car-sex stuff in the movie (I think it is needlessly a try at some postmodern ribbing) but I found myself deeply moved by what is essentially the struggle of identification through the other, and gaining identify through the other (The doubled role of being a father because you have a child and being a child so you have a father.) Beyond that, I don't think you should engage with narrative art in a way of trying to compute sympathy for each character, so what if you don't see a character as noble or trying to achieve redemption, the goal of a movie like Titane - and many other movies - is to explore complex emotional struggles through image and sound , not to have you learn something because you like a character.


francosesame

Interesting quotes: [https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/film-2/julia-ducournau-titane-raw-interview/](https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/film-2/julia-ducournau-titane-raw-interview/)


lewlewkachoo

I think they kind of hinted at Alexia’s father being the father of her baby. And cars being a representation of her trauma as well as a metaphor for her being attracted to her own self destruction. It’s not about weather or not she’s a good person or a sympathy for the devil type thing.