The amputated appendage tries to find its beloved owner in Jérémy Clapin’s wonderful, tender movie, the most daring animation of 2019
There’s a scene midway through this French animation that, for my money, is the tenderest and most lovely of the year – if a little macabre. In a
Paris bedroom, a severed hand creeps across the floor to a cot, picks up a dummy and gently pops it back in the mouth of a restless baby. The sleeping child, comforted, wraps her chubby fingers around the thumb of the hand, which quivers imperceptibly at the warmth of human touch: the hand is lonely, you see, separated from its body. Like so many moments in this strange, captivating film it’s unexpectedly moving.
I Lost My Body is directed by first-timer Jérémy Clapin, who gives us two stories in parallel: first, the severed hand’s mission to find its body; in the second, a chance to get to know its owner. He is Naoufel, a beloved only child growing up in Morocco. When his parents are both killed, Naoufel is brought to Paris to live with an uncaring uncle. And so this lively, open-hearted boy grows into an introverted, mumbly young man – a “lost kid”, says the carpenter who hires him (still in possession of two hands) as an apprentice. The realistic animation beautifully captures Paris as a working city with unlovely high-rises and polystyrene fast-food containers. Naoufel, meanwhile, begins to get his spark back when he meets a library worker called Gabrielle.