Julia Ducournau has became the second woman ever to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Her triumph is a suitably rock’n’roll ending for this year’s festival
Cannes let rip a punk power chord of glorious mischief by giving the Palme d’Or to Julie Ducournau’s gonzo genderqueer body-horror shocker Titane, and the jury and the movie’s many fans will have savoured the delicious applecart-upsetting thrill of it all. It’s the biggest épat since Lars Von Trier won it for Dancer in the Dark — and, importantly, it’s an award that makes Julie Ducournau only the second female Palme-winner in the festival’s history, since Jane Campion.
I must admit I was not a fan of Titane, being in my view not the best movie in competition, and not the best film that Ducournau has directed — being less interesting than her first film, the more complex and more shocking Raw. But I’m an enormous fan of challenging the consensus and overturning the tyranny of anaemic good taste, and perhaps there’s something in the perennial stateliness of cinéma that cries out to be trolled, a bit. Tonight Titane put its steel toe-capped boot through the origami flower of received wisdom. And there’s something refreshing in that.
