In addition to taking lessons this week, I’ve been watching a bunch of French movies. The latest of these is J’ai perdu mon corps, another from the list of films that Léo introduced me to on Tuesday. Released in 2019, it is an unusual and imaginative 80 minute animated feature voiced by a collection of actors unfamiliar to me. There is some dialogue, but also long uninterrupted stretches of music backing the animation. There are three principal characters: a young man, perhaps 20, born in Morocco but living in France; a young woman of the same age who works at a library and helps her ailing uncle; and a severed hand that has become active and escaped from a hospital lab freezer. Oh yeah, now might be a good time to translate the movie’s title: “I Lost My Body”. It’s based on a novel Happy Hand, published 2006.
The hand never interacts overtly with the other two characters, but spends a fair amount of time skittering around on five fingers, traversing floors, stairs, escalators, metro rails, building gutters, and a blind-man’s piano. The hand doesn’t speak, which partially explains the long scenes without dialogue. Other wordless scenes are reminiscences of better days: the young man was orphaned at age 10 and thinks of his parents often. The hand recalls when it ran through the sand, played the cello, or felt a snail. The story that plays out with all these scenes is not a happy one. How could it be when one character witnessed his parents death in a car crash, and the other witnessed its originating industrial accident, uh, first hand. But seeing all this tragedy playing out before me and learning eventually how the stories connect was unexpectedly heavy.
J’ai perdu mon corps won a slew of awards when it was released, including the 2019 Cannes Festival Grand Prize and 2020 César Prizes for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. The critics loved it, but it seems to have been a financial flop. It grossed just $1 million, while costing $5 million to make. Netflix picked it up and re-dubbed it with English audio (easy to do with animated features, I understand), which again makes me wonder about modern movie economics. There were no French closed-captions available, so I watched it on Netflix with French audio and no subtitles. The language was pretty easy to follow, and what I missed was not critical.
