Movie Review - I Lost My Body

This is the feature debut for French animator Jérémy Clapin. Unfortunately, I feel like this would have been better as a short film rather than a feature. It feels like a short film idea that was needlessly stretched out. The story told here doesn't seem vital or a narrative that felt important or compelling. If anything, the narrative came off as more problematic than anything else. In French culture, it's probably not problematic but totally fine. Yet, ultimately, it all ended up being pointless.

Based on Happy Hand by Guillaume Laurent, this film is divided into two pieces that are concurrently being played out. The first piece could be described as an origin story for the character of "Thing" from the famous cartoon The Addams Family. It's the story of a dismembered hand that doesn't atrophy and is capable of moving as if it had a mind and spirit of its own. The Addams Family simply had the dismembered hand as a funny and odd thing that would appear for comedic effect. The dismembered hand here is actually put into peril. However, it's difficult to gauge that peril, given that it's a dismembered hand. If being dismembered wasn't enough to hurt the hand, what would? The animation is done in such a way that makes us feel the peril, but the animation alone isn't enough. Another aspect is the dismembered hand being discovered by people. The hand stays hidden and that aspect is never challenged, not even by the end, which was disappointing.

The second piece of the film is the lame romance for Naoufel, a poor Parisian who works as a pizza delivery boy. He delivers pizzas by bicycle. On one rainy night, he has a bad delivery, but he ends up chatting up the woman who ordered the pizza. He never sees her. He only hears her voice because he gets stuck in the lobby of her building and only communicates with her through the intercom. He becomes enchanted by her that he sets out to find her. He does the creepy thing of following her to her job and then following her on the subway, eventually stalking her to her uncle's house. He lies or omits his stalking of her. He is able to get close to her, but when the truth comes out, she rightly rebukes him. To the film's credit, the romance doesn't really go any further, but the question arises of what the point of it was.

At one point, the film felt like it was a David Cronenberg film. It invoked the same kind of suspense and body horror of Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). Cronenberg's film though was about the hubris of man with science and the exploration of man's animal or even insect-like instincts. Cronenberg, however, had a more compelling romance and disillusionment of that romance. It wasn't creepy at the beginning but it got there. Here, Clapin's romance starts out creepy and therefore doesn't really have anywhere to go. It could have gone someplace but instead it suggests a potential suicide that ends up not being the case, which felt really problematic either way or just confusing as to why.

I will say that the film is a bit of a triumph of editing. The way the film cuts back-and-forth between the two pieces. The adventure of the dismembered hand and of Naoufel are interspersed in ways that are clever and in an almost perfect parallel. The film also seems to be set in the 1990's, which I'm not sure what the point of that was either unless that's when Laurent's story was originally set.

J'ai perdu mon corps.
Rated TV-MA.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 21 mins.

Available on Netflix.