☆☆☆½
What a strange work of wonder this film is -- another reminder in the age of big-studio dominance that animation is not always (or even ideally) about singing princesses or wisecracking playthings. But if a bug, a rat or a car can captivate, why not a hand?
It's a forlorn hand, severed from its former owner in an accident that opens the movie, one we don't see, though we learn who the hand belongs to and see the bloody aftermath. (Though it's all drawn, this movie might not be for the squeamish.) The hand is desperate to get back to its body. It is determined to find the place it belongs.
So, too, is the young man who used to call the hand his own. I Lost My Body is the story of that man, Naoufel, who has lost much more than his hand in his life. Through a dual series of flashbacks, he remembers his own life before one terrible afternoon, as the hand (apparently) recalls how the formerly fully limbed Naoufel came to fall rather awkwardly in something like love.
This French animated feature is bizarre, to be sure, and often emotionally uncomfortable. There's also tender wisdom in this story of the ways the past follows us wherever we go, how it insists on catching up with us, and the impossibility of ever really fitting who we were with who we are. It's surprisingly beautiful to watch, to listen to, and to ponder, through all its strangeness.
Viewed Dec. 27, 2019 -- Netflix
It's a forlorn hand, severed from its former owner in an accident that opens the movie, one we don't see, though we learn who the hand belongs to and see the bloody aftermath. (Though it's all drawn, this movie might not be for the squeamish.) The hand is desperate to get back to its body. It is determined to find the place it belongs.
So, too, is the young man who used to call the hand his own. I Lost My Body is the story of that man, Naoufel, who has lost much more than his hand in his life. Through a dual series of flashbacks, he remembers his own life before one terrible afternoon, as the hand (apparently) recalls how the formerly fully limbed Naoufel came to fall rather awkwardly in something like love.
This French animated feature is bizarre, to be sure, and often emotionally uncomfortable. There's also tender wisdom in this story of the ways the past follows us wherever we go, how it insists on catching up with us, and the impossibility of ever really fitting who we were with who we are. It's surprisingly beautiful to watch, to listen to, and to ponder, through all its strangeness.
Viewed Dec. 27, 2019 -- Netflix
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