S4E42.5: Titane

**November Kelly** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly, I am joined, as always, by my friends, Abigail Thorn and Devon.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:26)
Cowabung. God fucking dammit.

**November Kelly** (0:34)
And here I thought this was gonna be a nice restrained episode, because I made us do a sort of French art film that makes you feel bad, and no, turns out it's cars, it's all cars.

**Devon** (0:45)
Beep beep, listeners.

**November Kelly** (0:47)
Beep beep, like Charlie XCX.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:49)
But it made me feel bad for sure, but it also made me like, like lean really far back from the screen and cover my eyes and sort of grit my teeth a lot.

**Devon** (0:57)
Incredible film. I mean, listeners, let's lay the cards out up for you. If you haven't seen Titane, go see Titane. Like it is, whoo, difficult to watch in places, but as a movie, like as a, as a work of art, incredible.

**November Kelly** (1:10)
I'm so glad you liked it. I, the thing is, sometimes I go into an episode having a pretty clear idea of sort of what my narrative is going to be. This one, I don't know. It's a movie that I don't necessarily quite have a settled opinion on, exactly, but it is an uncomfortable watch, I will say that.

**Devon** (1:31)
I'll tell you one thing we can be certain of, is that every movie is either about 9-11 or being transgender, and this movie, it's not about 9-11. The director is incorrect. The director maintains this is about 9-11. It's not. She doesn't maintain that it's actually about 9-11, she just maintains-

**Abigail Thorn** (1:45)
She said that, she said that.

**Devon** (1:46)
She maintains very explicitly that it's not about being transgender, and the director is incorrect, that it is about being transgender.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:51)
Yes.

**Devon** (1:52)
Specifically, it's about being a trans man.

**November Kelly** (1:54)
Yes.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:55)
It is not something we've ever done, really, before.

**November Kelly** (1:57)
Not really, no.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:57)
In that sort of transgender movie hour.

**November Kelly** (1:59)
Something that I think the three of us are, oh, fully qualified to talk about. There was no need for us to bring anyone else in on this.

**Devon** (2:09)
Yeah. I failed to see how anyone could have.
As many of the fans suspect, Dev, you're a trans man, right?

**Abigail Thorn** (2:15)
That's absolutely correct. I will never reveal what my gender assigned at birth was.
They didn't get round to it, I was dying. I was choking to death.

**November Kelly** (2:22)
But, so, this is Julia De Quineau's, I think, second movie, after Raw.

**Devon** (2:30)
Yeah, I'm getting a lot of Raw vibes from this.

**November Kelly** (2:33)
Yeah, because on account of it was made by the same woman, is why. And I'm sure we will do Raw and we'll do Alpha at some point in the future. But, so, this is sort of my bonus pick, because I think it is really in, like, we're talking about cars in a way that I think really picks up on some themes of sort of like, yearning and like imperfect communication and embodiedness that we've done before.
And so, I think there's a really fruitful opportunity there.

**Devon** (3:07)
I think this movie makes an incredible follow-up piece to the Fast and Furious franchise, which...

**November Kelly** (3:11)
Yes.

**Devon** (3:12)
So, and I mean, I mean, it's absolutely seriously, we've watched a lot of movies where women's bodies are compared to cars. And this movie also does that, but in a very different way and very deliberately and very well.

**November Kelly** (3:24)
I have a little fact about this that will just really sort of land that. But so we begin with engine parts and leaking metal and sort of very physical, very kind of this feeling of like a living metal of like something that is engineered, but is also kind of like animalistic and feral, right?

**Devon** (3:44)
We also get, because it's a French film business, we start with a bunch of like loads and loads of logos from EU film studios. The European Union contributed about nine trillion to this. Also, one of the logos that we see at the start of the production companies just says CNC, which hmm.

**November Kelly** (4:00)
Uh-huh.
Also the Belgian federal tax shelter, which it's crazy that it's called that. You need to call it a fund. You can't call it a tax shelter.

**Abigail Thorn** (4:11)
Can't call it a tax shelter, man.

**Devon** (4:13)
That's where you take shelter from taxes.