A cut-off hand escapes from a dissection lab with one crucial goal: to get back to its body. As it scrambles through the pitfalls of Paris, it remembers its life with the young man it was once attached to, until they met Gabrielle.
Deliciously bizarre, I Lost My Body is a French-animated story that looks at the formation of a connection between two youths, and the peculiarly thrilling adventure of a disembodied hand searching for the rest of its body. While the feature does come with an English dub available on Netflix, there is something more touching about its original French audio.
Directed by Jérémy Clapin, and written by Clapin and Guillaume Laurant, I Lost My Body is a unique premise that raises a lot of questions, and answers a lot of other questions that you didn't know you had. It is this disparity between what receives a pay off and what is left up to the audience's interpretation, that leaves this film feeling less than amazing. Less than amazing because the animation style is riveting to watch.
The fact that they can make a story about a literal severed hand, and ensure that it doesn't come across as sick or scary, is a feat in itself. Everyone has seen Thing from The Addams Family, and the mechanics of movement--walking or running on the fingertips--is something that can easily mirror the movements of spiders or rats, which makes the care taken in the animation of the hand is exemplary. One could easily go as far as to say that the musculature and tendons of hands have been thoroughly studied, as the hands portion of the story is devoid of all dialogue (obviously) and the tone and emotion is portrayed purely by the atmospheric score, and the animation. It is but a hand, and yet as members of the audience we are able to pick up when the hand is feeling lost, resigned, comfortable, fearful, or tense.
The story of the hand is simple. A journey across a large distance (from the hands perspective, at least), but its size and shape leads to a number of obstacles that it needs to overcome, all of which capture the imagination in their creativity. This arc is intertwined with the main story, with no detrimental effects on the pacing of the overall piece (though it would be hard to slow down an 80-minute flick).
The main story between Gabrielle and Naofel is a tender one, albeit a bit stalkerish at times. Not a formulaic love story in the slightest, the film tackles the loss and grief that a once-promising boy still struggles with in his adulthood. Nihilism on full display, this is an interpretation of youth that many will be able to relate to; the anxiety, the depression, the self-blame, and the questioning of one's purpose in life. It is his interaction with Gabrielle--over an intercom, of all things--that sparks curiosity and emotion. The intrigue that comes about from watching Naofel struggle to feel that emotion, is gripping.
The two stories do come together in the final act, but still manage to maintain a level of independence throughout. Melancholic with an atmospheric ambient score, I Lost My Body is all about gathering the courage to let go of the past and to take the jump into the unknown. With a fascinating combination of déjà vu, sounds, and flashbacks, I Lost My Body makes full use of of the visual and audio components of the film to bring a minimalistic story to a heightened emotional depth. Well worth checking out.