Usually
when a severed hand scuttles about of its own accord, it is the stuff of horror
movies, as in Evil Dead II, The Beast
with Five Fingers (starring Peter Lorre), and Oliver Stone’s The Hand, the undeniable pinnacle of his
career. This hand is something different. Instead, it represents humanity in
all its tragic pathos throughout Jeremy Clapin’s Oscar-qualified Netflix
animated feature, I Lost My Body,
which screens during the 2019/2020 season of MoMA’s annual Contenders series.
Naoufel
harbored dreams of being both an astronaut and a concert pianist, until his
Moroccan parents are killed in a traffic accident. He subsequently finds
himself living in Paris with his cold-hearted uncle and his sleazy older
cousin. To pay his share of the expenses, Naoufel works (badly) as a pizza
delivery prole, but his frequent tardiness is costly. Then one rainy night,
Naoufel has an intriguing conversation with the mysterious Gabrielle through
the intercom of her fashionable high-rise building. Soon, he becomes borderline
obsessed with her, so he sets out to find the snarky librarian in real,
face-to-face life.
As
Naoufel’s story unfolds in flashbacks, we follow his former hand as it escapes
from some sort of lab and makes its way through the streets of Paris, in search
of its full body. We can tell it is indeed Naoufel’s hand by the tell-tale
birthmark and based on second act developments, viewers can probably take a
credible stab guessing how the two became separated. Yet, the exact
circumstances still pack a dramatic punch.
The
animation crafted by Clapin, “animation director” David Nasser, and their team
of artists is unusually elegant and also distinctively moody, in a very French
kind of way. Although there are clearly heavy symbolic and psychological
dimensions to the film, the scrambling hand itself almost always comes across
as being diegetically “real,” which is preferable. (Let’s be honest, most
genre fans have seen more than enough “none-of-that-really-happened” cop-out
climaxes.) Nevertheless, the ending is still enormously ambiguous, but it
arguably works after a bit of reflection.
