The Close-up

On today’s episode of our daily NYFF59 podcasts, NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez is joined by director Julia Ducournau and lead actors Vincent Lindon and Agathe Rousselle to discuss Titane, a Main Slate selection at NYFF59. Titane plays at the 59th New York Film Festival Wednesday, September 29 at 3:45pm. Standby only tickets may be available. The winner of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or, Titane is a thrillingly confident vision from Julia Ducournau that deposits the viewer directly into its director’s headspace. Moving with the logic of a dream—and often the force of a nightmare—the film begins as a kind of horror movie, with a series of shocking events perpetrated by Alexia (Agathe Rouselle, in a dynamic and daring breakthrough), a dancer with a titanium plate in her skull following a childhood car accident. However, once Alexia goes into hiding from the police, and is taken in by a grief-stricken firefighter (Vincent Lindon), Ducournau reveals her deployment of genre tropes to be a