J’ai perdu mon corps (2019)

Directed by: Jeremy Clapin | 81 minutes | animation, drama | Original voice cast: Victoire Du Bois, Hakim Faris, Patrick d’Assumçao, Alfonso Arfi, Hichem Mesbah, Myriam Loucif, Bellamine Abdelmalek, Maud Le Guenedal, Nicole Favart, Quentin Baillot, Céline Ronté, Deborah Grall, Pascal Rocher, Bruno Hausler, Jocelyn Veluire, Raymond Hosni, Guillaume Desmarchellier

Just imagine: in a laboratory there is a kind of cold store with all kinds of body parts. A jar full of eyes, organs in strong water, a few limbs. But then suddenly a free hand starts to move. An eye also rolls out of the pot and seems to take in its surroundings in minute detail. The hand, on the other hand, looks harried; like he needs to get out of the lab ASAP. Despite his mutilation, he is still quite agile, because he climbs up past a skeleton. Along the way, the necessary bones fall down, so that the professor smells danger and comes to take a look. The hand secretly crawls through a high cupboard to the open window, even before the professor has been able to catch it. In the wide world he hopes to find the body he belongs to. The eye? That will be trampled if it can’t roll aside in time when the professor wants to close the window… If you think this scene is from a horror movie, you’re wrong. Because ‘J’ai perdu mon corps’ (2019) is mainly a love story, subdued and sober with themes such as fate, detachment, hope, loneliness and mourning. This French animation film for adults (a genre that the French are very good at, we saw in ‘Persepolis’ (2007)) was made with various techniques, including rotoscopy, which makes the images very realistic.

‘J’ai perdu mon corps’ might as well have been called ‘J’ai perdu ma main’, because the film follows two storylines that slowly creep towards each other. On the one hand, there is the brave hand, which braves the Parisian streets to find his accompanying body, sleeping under a bridge and coming into contact with aggressive rats, a fetching dog and a sleeping baby. On the other hand, there are the long flashbacks in which we get to know twenty-year-old Naoufel, the ‘owner’ of the hand. He grew up in Morocco, where he dreams of becoming an astronaut and pianist as a little boy. But disaster strikes when both his parents are killed in a car accident and the young Naoufel is sent to his cranky uncle and older cousin in Paris. He changes from a cheerful boy into an introverted, shy and confused teenager who can hand in the hard-earned money he earns from his part-time job as a pizza delivery boy to his uncle when he returns home. Naoufel is at a dead end when he meets Gabrielle one evening. Or well, meet – they speak through the intercom. Naoufel is forty minutes late with the pizza she ordered, so he doesn’t take a good look at her right away. But their meeting makes him a different person. Only, instead of addressing her, he decides to follow her. To stalk as it were. Apparently Naoufel is not the type to take the easy way out.

The basis of ‘J’ai perdu mon corps’ – the debut of Jeremy Clapin – is the novel ‘Happy Hand’ by Guillaume Laurant. If that name does not immediately mean something to you; he frequently collaborates with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of, among others, ‘Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain’ (2001). However, Clapin makes it his own story entirely; the meeting with Gabrielle via the intercom, among other things, originated entirely from his own brain. His tone is more serious than what we are used to from Laurant, more melancholy too. The figure Naoufel walks with his soul under his arm. In his young life he has already experienced a lot of drama and tragedy, but there was little or no room for mourning and processing, with the result that he is desperately looking for a life buoy. You already know that there comes a point somewhere where he loses his hand; a moment that hangs over the film like a sword of Damocles. You also know that there will come a time when the hand and the body will find each other again. That knowledge keeps you fully engaged in the story. And if it’s not the storytelling technique that keeps you fascinated, then it is certainly the special animation technique. Naoufel is so incredibly shy that he makes remarkable choices in his life. Nevertheless, he has our sympathy; we hope not only that he and his hand find each other, but also that he finds love with Gabrielle. ‘J’ai perdu mon corps’ is pregnant with symbolism; in almost every scene we see a fly, umbrella or an igloo and the hand itself is of course the symbol of Naoufel’s guilt. Slightly less symbolism would certainly have increased effectiveness.

‘J’ai perdu mon corps’ is a sober but fascinating animation film about a detached boy who is looking for something to hold on to in life, literally and figuratively. A film that on the one hand has a surrealistic starting point, but on the other hand tells a story taken from life. It is remarkable how debutant Clapin manages to find the balance in this.