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In its swift, endearing 80 minutes, French animator Jérémy Clapin’s first feature packs in romance, action, body horror and a surreal road-movie odyssey. Subjects raised, meanwhile, include the immigrant’s lot in France and the precarity of life in the gig economy.
- Dead Hand's Man.
- I Lost My Body Gallery
- Verdict
By Matt Fowler
Updated: Dec 5, 2019 6:59 pm
Posted: Dec 5, 2019 6:45 pm
I Lost My Body is currently streaming on Netflix.
One of Netflix's more curious acquisitions this past year is a gorgeous and hypnotically haunting animated feature that made an award-winning splash at the Cannes Film Festival: Jérémy Clapin's I Lost My Body.
Clapin is adapting a book here -- Happy Hand, by Guillaume Laurant (who's worked as a writer on such films as Amélie and The City of Lost Children) -- though this apparently isn't Clapin's first piece of animation to merge emotional unrest with traumatic physical displacement.
Two stories are working side by side in this dreamscape tale of a once-profoundly loved boy, Naoufel (voiced by Dev Patel in the English dub), sent adrift by an accident that orphans him and forces him to move to Paris where he's raised in squalor, in a life devoid of kindness and connection. As a disembodied, sentient hand escapes a local laboratory, embarking on a crazy cross-town trek, we see Naoufel meet a young librarian named Gabrielle (Alia Shawkat) and fall in love.
As the young man struggles to find common ground with the first person he's felt close to in a decade, the hand, in a separate moment in time, travels across the city to a place familiar to Naoufel. Along the way, it battles rats and pigeons, dodges pedestrians and cars, and struggles to traverse the harrowing cityscape, all the while delivering a very different type of narrative, and slice of animation, than the more traditional tragicomedy going on between Naoufel and Gabrielle.
The hand segments of the story are phenomenally clever and surprisingly emotional. They differ from the Naoufel side of the coin, which feels more static and psychologically motivated. The hand's journey is a playfully endearing action movie. It's not treated like a goof or a gimmick but as a very primal directive. It's more raw even than a pet trying to return to its family. Nothing deters the hand as it ascends buildings, travels into subway tunnels, and invades apartments.
There's a delicate mystery at play, one that you almost don't want to be solved because it's hard to picture any good news stemming from their two stories possibly colliding or retroactively connecting. Obviously, I won't divulge what the ultimate payoff is, or if it feels like the right resolution, but it sure does resonate. It's a movie you'll think about for a long while after the credits roll, possibly meditating on the brutal beauty of life's lamentable left turns.
Jérémy Clapin's bold and bizarre film is a poignantly maddening meditation on the cruel nature of disconnection. It's also profoundly gorgeous, offering up a floating, weaving narrative that will sit with you even though it delivers little-to-no answers or affirmations.
Nov 8, 2019 · A work of immense imagination and macabre creativity, Jérémy Clapin’s animated feature debut I Lost My Body tells emotional accounts of loss with a morbid sense of humour.
- 8 min
- Kambole Campbell
My opinion/analysis on "I Lost My Body". One of the rare animated films intended entirely for adults, Jérémy Clapin's fairly brief work based on Guillaume Laurant's Happy Hand novel tells a tragic yet hopeful story in a very unique way.
Nov 9, 2019 · I Lost My Body finds poetry in tracing life’s uncertainties, focusing equally on moments of shared connection and incidental loss until the two feel indistinguishable, as one part of a delicate whole.
Nov 15, 2019 · Criticism. Movies. ‘I Lost My Body’ Review: This Poetic Fable About a Severed Hand Is the Best Animated Film of the Year. A severed hand crawls across Paris in search of its body in a fable...
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Dec 5, 2019 · I Lost My Body is a wholly unique animated film about loss and longing, presented in both a melancholic and entertaining way.
