The incendiary arrival of strikingly androgynous French star Agathe Rousselle on our cinema screens is the stuff movies are made of. Like many of us, she spent her twenties flitting between various gigs, some more glitzy than others. She’s waited tables and tended bars, edited a feminist zine, worked the camera in modelling gigs and leapt behind it as a photographer. But the day a casting director slid into her Instagram DMs asking her to try out for Raw director Julia Ducournau’s mind-bending sophomore feature Titane changed everything.
Rousselle plays Alexia, a car crash survivor, exotic dancer and serial killer with a titanium plate in her head and a kink for getting it on with cars. Her eye-opening turn is all the more astounding for it being her first feature. A predominantly non-verbal role, it required her to convey inner turmoil through an extremely physical performance. She has to fight, and the film’s unforgettable opening sequence also required Rousselle to shoot 30-plus takes of a grinding dance routine on a Cadillac bonnet. Something of a baptism of fire, she relished the burn.
“You know, when you start with something that is this challenging, it’s really good, because it makes you feel like you can do anything,” Rousselle says of the role that has catapulted her into the limelight. “It gives me a lot of confidence and strength, because shooting it was very intense, and so was the preparation. So now I’m like, ‘Okay, bring it on’. Like, I can take anything, honestly.”
Titane drove Rousselle onto the world stage, appearing at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. She was standing alongside Ducournau when her director became only the second woman in the festival’s history to take home the top prize for best film, the Palme d’Or. And while Rousselle may be new to a dream job she has coveted all her life, she says Ducournau was a great guide. “She knows exactly what she wants. We had such long days of shooting, so having someone who has a very clear idea really helps. I felt very secure.”
Titane constantly upends audience expectations, forcing them to second-guess what a shape-shifting Alexia will do next. All the while, it demolishes boundaries erected around gender and sexuality. But while much of the focus has been on the film’s shocking transformations and gory violence, it is also surprisingly tender. Esteemed French actor Vincent Lindon plays an emotionally closed off fireman who becomes something of a warped father figure for Alexia.
“It’s basically a love story,” Rousselle says. “It’s about how you can regain your own humanity at any given time. It could just be in the right circumstances, and you find the right people. If your family is not really right for you, because it’s basically people you didn’t choose, you can still make your own. So there’s also a message of hope there.”
Anyone who has watched will recognise these themes. It’s as much a coming-of-age film about found family as it is a cannibalistic horror, with its star Garance Marillier also popping up here in a memorable cameo. Rousselle had not seen the film when she first received that fateful DM. In fact, she’s not much of a horror fan at all.
“Oh no, no, no, I’m scared to death,” she laughs. “Like, I don’t understand why people would do that to themselves. It’s horrible. I tried to watch Suspiria, the latest one with Tilda Swinton, because I love her so much. At least like mummy is here, so it’s gonna be fine. And no, I had to stop after like a half an hour and say, ‘I’m not doing this to myself’.”
She dove into Raw before auditioning to get into Ducournau’s way of filmmaking. “I didn’t think it was such like a horror movie. But there were some scenes that was like, ‘oh, hell, I’m just gonna go to the toilet now’.”
After landing the role, Ducournau tasked Rousselle with watching David Cronenberg’s infamous automobile-erotica Crash. She also got into the zone of playing a dangerous but confoundingly sympathetic woman by watching Charlize Theron in Monster and Jodie Comer in Killing Eve. “You know, I had to love her,” Rousselle says of Alexia. “It’s a very common thing for an actor to say, but it’s true that if you don’t love your character, it’s impossible to work with them. So I had to activate my compassion and reach out to her with empathy.”
Without spoiling too much of a film you really should go into knowing as little about as possible, Alexia goes through some dramatic physical changes in Titane. “You have to feel it in your bones,” Rousselle says. “If you act pain and extreme suffering, at some point, even though it’s fake, you know it passes through your own body anyway. When you breathe really heavily and quickly, you get dizzy. I had to stop several times because I was almost fainting. Sometimes it gets you in some kind of a trance.”
Lindon was a great support during these startling scenes, Rousselle says. “The moment that I had to transform physically, it was kind of hard for me for many reasons, and he found the right words. He was so kind, and he just told me, ‘Agathe, right now you have a fake broken nose and you look like shit, but you can’t not be beautiful, so don’t worry.’ That was really comforting.”
While Rousselle leads Titane, directed by Ducournau, and gets to fight back against a would-be male rapist, she does not see it as a feminist film. “She’s also a psychopath who finds her humanity because she’s staying with this older white guy,” she chuckles.
But there is certainly power in her performance, she agrees. “When you’re a woman and you’re walking alone at night, you’re in danger. I don’t do it, or I have my keys in my hand and I feel threatened all the time, as most women do. Alexia is never in danger because she can kill people. I wish more women could feel that powerful, though I am not for killing people.”
Alexia’s weapon of choice, a razor-sharp hairpin that is also mistaken for a knitting needle, is a smart subversion of gender expectations. “It is something you wouldn’t expect,” Rousselle agrees, and that goes to the heart of what makes Titane so gloriously transgressive.
Titane is now streeaming at SBS On Demand.
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Titane
