I Lost My Body Review: A severed hand on a beautiful, beautiful quest

Pop culture fans probably already have some emotional associations with severed hands crawling around the screen independently. The “pet” of the Addams family, Thing, is an eerie version of the picture. Ash’s war against his own hand in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II is heading in a better direction. Many other horror films have severed hands running around attacking people.

But evil hands are almost always a bit funny at least. No matter how much they look like fleshy spiders, no matter how bad their intentions are, no matter how much they symbolize a terrible lack of body autonomy or a failure of self-control, they are inherently a little stupid. This is one of the reasons why Jérémy Clapin’s animated debut in the French director “I Lost My Body” is so surprising and touching.

Partially from the perspective of a severed hand and partly by flashbacks to the life of the young man with whom he was once associated, the film finds a kind of hideous melancholy in the notion of a hand crawling without its owner, a deep loneliness comes with the feeling of incompleteness. I’ve lost my body is basically weird and possibly repugnant. But it’s also visually and emotionally beautiful, one of the most ambitious and exciting films of 2019.

The film begins with the hand lying in a pool of blood, the moment the incident frees it. The nature of this moment only becomes clear towards the end of the film – instead, Clapin focuses on the “awakening” of the hand and the gradual escape from a morgue in the hospital as it evades the humans and approaches the dangers way out of the building. In eerie grayscale images, the story goes back to small, ordinary moments in which the hand was part of a body – holding toys, playing musical instruments and even exploring the tangled depths of a wet nostril.

But at some point, these flashbacks blossom into a larger backstory. The former owner of the hand is Naoufel, a young Parisian whose happy childhood was interrupted by an event that put him in the care of grumpy, indifferent relatives. Naoufel is older now and works as a pizza delivery guy. She is withdrawn, uncommunicative and shy. A chance encounter with a sharp and stylish girl named Gabrielle leads him to the kind of questionable behavior that is often rewarded in Rome Coms: follow her, arrange a supposed chance meeting, submitting herself to false accusations in her life. Meanwhile, the hand continues its eerie path through a city full of surprising dangers.

It is not very complicated to combine the helplessness and isolation of the hand with Naoufel’s own way of life. Neither he nor his hand seem to belong entirely to the world – it is a creepy and apparently supernatural anomaly, while he is aimless and indrawn and has no obvious future in front of him. But the hand is more determined and daring than he, and unlike him, it seems to make sense. The clear desire to get somewhere and achieve something makes this story seem more like a symbolic fairytale than a simple exercise in surrealism.

The sympathies of the story for Naoufel change precariously with every new bad decision he makes. Sometimes he seems like a lonely protagonist in a romantic drama designed to get the girl and win the day. At other times, his cowardly, deceptive behavior is hard to respect. In the meantime, Gabrielle often looks more like a distant fantasy than a figure, though her first conversation points to a depth of dissatisfaction and separation that corresponds to his or her hand. Both are clever and slim thanks to the visual style of the film. These are exaggerated caricatures of people who always look a bit subdued and uncomfortable. As they move through a Paris full of warm colors and sounds, they seldom have the feeling of belonging everywhere.

The autonomous, heroically severed hand may be an indication that Clapin and co-author Guillaume Laurant (screenwriter of Amélie and author of the French novel adapted by this film) are not intending to put this story in familiar, easy-to-anticipate drawers. They even narrate the everyday parts of Naoufel’s story in a sleepy, subjective way, infusing it into his dreams and dreams that might come from his point of view or out of hand. In both cases, the visions are remarkably impressive: when the hand on the beach digs into the sand and the grains of sand flow out between the fingers, the cinematography is so sharp and the details so precise that the audience can almost feel them warmth of the sun and of the sand under the fingernails of the hand.

And other small, meaningful details also shape the story. Some are visual: Naoufel’s common room at home is barren, except for a picture of a satellite that suggests a bitter fantasy of escape. The tiny, consistent mole on his hand is a constant reminder that the detached body part that climbs through the city is his – that’s not all just a sophisticated bait. Other important details are acoustic. Naoufel is obsessed with a tape recorder that his family gave him a long time ago, and especially with being able to relive one of the worst moments of his life through a random sound recording. Like Blow Out, I Lost My Body keeps returning to the idea of ​​moments that are held by sounds and then invoked through repeated, sometimes self-destructive listening. It is certainly both that Naoufel spends so much time tormenting himself with this volume, and that he chooses a physically passive form of self-destruction. It takes a crisis to get out of this passivity, and much of the film goes to this moment when it finally has to experience something real and immediate without pushing for a comfortable lie.

But much of I Lost My Body is intense and immediate, not just the climax. The fight of the hand against rats in the Paris Metro is as breakneck as a good thriller, and the problems with a dove are startling and grotesque. As the story approaches the key moments – not so much the discovery of how Naoufel lost his hand, but the question of what came after and where it goes – Clapin alternates between thoughtful tension and breathtaking suspense. It’s amazing how much drama and goodwill he makes from such a strange and humorous picture – a body part crawling on its own, waging tiny wars and taking great risks. It’s enough to make decades of silly comedy horrors with severed hands seem more tragic and lovable in retrospect.

I Lost My Body is now streamed to Netflix.