I lost my Body

 Jeremy Clapin's French language animated film, I Lost my Body (2020) is a puzzling movie that straddles several genres.  Apparently intended as a kind of fantastic allegory, the movie is too realistic in texture and detail to be conventionally surrealistic.  Rather, the movie suggests a sort of ill-designed parable, a Kafkaesque fable that is too improbable to be taken seriously, but that doesn't ever venture into really delirious or expressionistically adventurous territory.  The tone of the film is also uncertain -- the plot has a certain pervasive sadness and pathos, but the movie is a little too icy and indeterminate to maintain that mood. There's a love story that's too unresolved and abstract to be effective -- romance, as it were, without romance.  And, aspects of the short picture (it's 80 minutes long) exploit well-established horror film devices -- but, although a bit gruesome, the cartoon isn't particularly frightening.  It's hard to know what to make of this picture and, unfortunately, I think the movie is a little too slight, even, I dare say, twee, to encourage the viewer to spend much time trying to work out its mysteries.  In effect, the film is like its twin heroes, Nafouel with his missing hand and Nafouel's hand with a missing body -- there's something severed, amputated, missing from the story.  

There are three strands to the plot, all intertwined and presented with flashbacks and flashforwards.  The peculiar intricacy of the narrative suggests, I think, that the film maker is not entirely comfortable presenting events in chronological order and without mystifying shifts in time sequence and tone.  If the film were presented as a continuous narrative, I think the story's implausibility would overcome its dramatic interest -- we'd get bogged down with stuff that makes no sense or that we don't understand and would dismiss the film outright.  The dizzying shifts in chronology, sometimes signaled by changes in color (the remote past is shown in black and white) conceal problems with the plot.  

In the first strand of the film, an amputated hand escapes from a refrigerator where it is being cooled with a bucket of eyeballs.  The hand escapes its chilly prison and, then, sets off on an odyssey to rejoin the body from which it has been severed.  In this narrative, the hand darts around like a spider (or The Beast with Five Fingers in Robert Florey's 1947 horror move -- itself derived from The Hands of Orloc made by Robert Wiene in 1924 and Karl Freund's 1935 Mad Love, both films infused with German expressionism.).  The hand fights rats, gets half-drowned in an icy river, nearly is run over by traffic, is attacked by ants and flies, and, finally, wafts it's way over the city of Paris (I think), borne aloft by an umbrella.  At last, the hand finds its owner but the reunion is disappointing and amounts to nothing.  In the end, the amputated hand sits atop a ruinous warehouse building surveying the city.  But the term "surveying" and the bucket of eyeballs in the fridge embody a serious problem -- the hand has no eyes and can't see.  Therefore, how does it navigate all of the exciting perils that it encounters?  This seems like a trivial objection, but it's an important one.  Fantasy has to establish rules and play according to them -- here there are no rules governing the hand's adventures and, therefore, although these parts of the movie are thrillingly animated, we don't really have much emotional investment in them because the hand's peregrinations are simply too weird and mysterious:  why has the hand been stored in a refrigerator with eyeballs?  why doesn't the hand decompose?  how does it find it's way through the world?  And, when the hand is reunited with its owner, why isn't more made of this encounter?  (The hero is asleep and doesn't even know that his hand has come back to pay him a visit).  The film cunningly focuses on hands in all of its three strands and, at one point, a man says that the hand is what shapes matter into useful form. And, indeed, there's a shot of the hand rearing up over the city like a tarantula above graffiti that says "I am" -- is the hand supposed to be some sort of divinity?  It's impossible to tell. Certainly, animation has a "hand-made quality' and, I suppose, that the image of cunning, disembodied hand has something to do with the way in which the movie was made.  But again none of this is clear.

The second component to the film is the backstory of the hero Nauofel. We see him as a little boy with his parents.  His mother and father are gracious and kind.  There is discussion about how to catch a fly in your fist -- you have to aim where you think the fly will go when you sweep your hand toward it.  Apparently, the hero's family lives in Algeria.  On the way to a party there's an accident and Nauofel's parents are both killed.  Somehow, the child is sent to France where he seems to have been abandoned at about the age of 15.  This part of the film moves inexorably toward the climax of the car crash, caused, in part, by an aggressive fly.

The majority of the film involves Nauofel's adventures in Paris.  We find him working as an inept pizza delivery boy.  After his bicycle gets smashed up in a crash with a car, he delivers a pizza to a feisty girl who lives on the 35th floor of an apartment building.  He never sees the girl during the failed delivery but she seems to flirt with him and Nauofel decides to track her down.  The girl, Gabrielle, works at a library.  Naoufel, afraid to introduce himself as the voice on the other side of the intercom when he delivered the squashed pizza, meets the girl in the library.  He watches her, but is afraid to speak.  Later, he discovers that Gabrielle has an uncle who runs a decrepit word-working shop.  Nauofel finagles his way into the uncle's shop as an apprentice.  Of course, the shop is full of jig- and circular saws that cause the attentive viewer to shiver with dismay.  The girl has told Nauofel that she has a fantasy of living in a cozy igloo atop her apartment building.  Nauofel becomes friends with the girl and, in fact, builds a wooden igloo on top of an abandoned warehouse.  He invites Gabrielle to this hideaway and announces to her that he is the pizza delivery man with whom she flirted over the intercom.  Far from being pleased by this revelation, Gabrielle is appalled -- she interprets Nauofel's awkward overtures as "stalking" and angrily denounces him.  Nauofel goes to a party, gets drunk and fights with his roommate.  The next day, upset with losing Gabrielle, he takes some alka-seltzer and tries to catch a pesky fly while operating a circular saw.  We know the outcome.  After a brief hospitalization, Nauofel decides to take a literal "leap of faith" -- he climbs up on the abandoned warehouse and jumps onto an adjacent construction derrick.  Gabrielle has been looking for him, but she has missed him at his customary haunts -- he has given up his little room above the wood-working shop.  Having succeeded in his daring leap, the one-handed Nauofel sits on the crane (query? how is he going to get back to the top of the warehouse?)  Snow falls and he lays down, possibly to rest or, maybe, to die in the gently falling flakes  By this point, his poor errant hand is out of the movie.  I think the hand watches his leap, but, then, what?

I suppose the film is supposed to be about "amputation".  The idea of being alienated, cut off from one's home language and homeland is possibly thematic to the film.  Many of the characters seem rather truncated and detached and, probably, the movie suggests that the condition of modern city dwellers is to exist as "amputated" beings.  Certainly, Nafouel has been untimely severed from his kind artistic parents and the warm sunny palm trees in his native North Africa.  (For some unknown reason, the film makers represent Algeria, if that is Nafouel's home, in black and white -- it would seem to me more logical to show North Africa in color.  But this is merely one of the many peculiar and baffling decisions that characterize this odd picture.) 

As a side-note, the hero says that he admires Sergio Leone's movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly particularly Lee van Cleef's character.  If I recall properly, this character is a gunfighter so fast on the draw that he can catch a fly in mid-air in his fist.