I Lost My Body is a French animated film directed by Jérémy Clapin that glides through the love, loss, and self-discovery of a young man named Noufelle. The story is a gritty, beautiful, and while the original plot confuses and distances moviegoers at times, it becomes worthwhile by its conclusion.
To the audience, one of the more unique parts of the film is the added storyline of Noufelle’s severed hand’s mission of reunification across Paris. The scenes involving the hand truly showcase the beauty of the animation style; Its careful pencil-sketched movements are delicate, deft, and deliberate. One small caveat to this is that there is a bit of an uncanny valley effect with the characters that leave them looking a bit creepy, but the realism of their moments and actions usually offsets this. Furthermore, good lighting in animated films is a mesmerizing thing that is often hard to find, but this film gets it wonderfully right in bright sharp scenes that pop out among the dark comic-book look of other scenes. This expertise livens the scenes with the severed hand that focus on various actions or struggles, emphasizing its role of survival and robotic determination to find its body. The excitement, wonder, and suspense the hand experiences are enhanced by perspective shots forcing the audience to experience the tumultuous world as the hand does. However, whenever Noufelle’s story became interesting, the hand seems more like an unwelcome distraction. The audience gets a little bored following the random wanderings of the Addams Family’s Thing on the other side of the city over the heartaches and longings of a breathing intriguing human Noufelle. If the audience braves this directionless side story for some time, the harshness of the hand’s reality wears away into beautiful gestures and dream-like visions that leave them with the lovely wanderlust an artsy independent film secretly promises.
Though there are beautiful mini-monologues and stunning visuals scattered throughout the movie, I Lost My Body is no romantic film. The premise of the movie is fantastical, but Noufelle’s life is realistic, disappointing, and yet hopeful in small unexpected ways. The flashbacks to Noufelle’s childhood and the mysterious few characters that blend from past to present pull the audience in and throw pieces of a puzzle up into the air for the audience to attempt to put together. It’s disorienting at times, throwing out a little bit too much vagueness that leaves the audiences floating alone in a pool of ideas, images, and feelings. However, if the viewer pushes through these moments, the connection of all these ideas is masterful and well worth the confusion. This movie would be even more brilliant the second time when the audience can find more pieces and put them together more efficiently; There is so much to uncover with every subsequent viewing. However, I believe that this film is a good movie to watch once for the moment-to-moment experience of something fresh and interesting, but not necessarily something I would personally want to watch to enjoy again. The film doesn’t give the moviegoer what it wants in terms of relationships between people and their goals that run throughout the movie. Instead, the moviegoer understands something at the end that they can’t quite put into words, some shared novel mutual human understanding Claplin reaches out and slowly uncovers for them to see.
3/5 STARS