I Lost My Body

I’ve always been par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of the hands of my loved ones. My mother’s – like my grandmother’s – are ele­gant­ly slen­der, while my father’s feel like the warmest place on earth. Hands tell sto­ries. They car­ry the wear of the day or, if you’re so inclined to believe it, con­tain the path of your own future, lined with fore­shad­ow­ings of chil­dren, mar­riage and a (hope­ful­ly) long life span.

Gen­tle imagery of touch and feel­ing ele­vates Jérémy Clapin’s I Lost My Body to the lev­el of a ten­der ode to the beau­ty of the human hand. This earnest emo­tion is woven into the fab­ric of the sto­ry of the young Naoufel who nav­i­gates life as an immi­grant bound to the out­skirts of a Paris with no Eif­fel Tow­er in sight. Clapin’s tex­tured ani­ma­tion rests in the ban­lieue and the alien­at­ing spaces of indus­tri­al parks, speed­ing motor­ways and dank back alleys.

Naoufel, we learn through occa­sion­al back­sto­ry frag­ments, moves to France fol­low­ing the death of his par­ents in their native Moroc­co. Crammed into one room with his old­er, ill-tem­pered cousin, and work­ing a lousy piz­za deliv­ery job, there is lit­tle solace to be found in his every­day life. A chance encounter over an apart­ment block inter­com with Gabrielle, a cus­tomer wait­ing on her late piz­za, sparks a new ener­gy into the young, lone­ly boy.

Mean­while, explor­ing these for­got­ten and dilap­i­dat­ed areas at ground lev­el is a sev­ered hand, the sec­ond pro­tag­o­nist occu­py­ing one of the film’s split time­lines. Hav­ing escaped from a test lab­o­ra­to­ry, the hand – all stum­bling fin­gers but a quick-think­ing mind of its own – goes out into this Parisian land­scape in search of the body it was once attached. The non-lin­ear struc­ture lends itself to this del­i­cate­ly con­struct­ed por­trait of his­to­ry and mem­o­ry across two dis­tinct yet inter­wo­ven lives.

Still, the escapades of this lone­ly mitt are most­ly ter­ror-laden. Stran­gling a pigeon in an ear­ly scene is the only way to save itself from falling to cat­a­stro­phe, while a face-off against a trio of hun­gry rats on the Metro is wracked with ten­sion. Clapin’s film often shifts to this dark­er, jump-scarey tone, though the height­ened dra­ma of the hand’s jour­ney is bal­anced with the soft­er, nos­tal­gia-laced aspects of Naoufel’s story.

There are some moments that feel a lit­tle mis­placed and unwar­rant­ed, such as Naoufel’s pur­suit of Gabrielle. It endors­es the creepy stalk­ing of a female char­ac­ter who has lit­tle more depth than your clas­sic Man­ic Pix­ie Dream Girl. There is a poignan­cy to both the hand and Naoufel’s rela­tion­ships to their past and what lies ahead, but the reliance on ideas of des­tiny and fate feels a lit­tle thin in retrospect.

In its qui­eter moments the ani­ma­tion glows with warmth, even in the black and white used to depict the boy’s mem­o­ry of his upbring­ing. A hand sinks into grains of sand to lift up a seashell. Dust par­ti­cles linger in the light of a fad­ing sun­set, glint­ing through bro­ken win­dows in aban­doned spaces. There is a tac­tile qual­i­ty to the imagery that cre­ates a wel­com­ing space for the view­er to engage with, using these spe­cif­ic yet uni­ver­sal touch­es of expe­ri­ence and rem­i­nis­cence to stir­ring effect.