It was Christmas break. I lay in bed desperately scrolling through Netflix for something to watch. Suddenly, something caught my eye. Netflix had added a movie that I had been meaning to watch for weeks, “I Lost My Body,” to my Top Picks. The description was simple enough: “Romance, mystery and adventure intertwine as a young man falls in love, and a severed hand scours Paris for its owner in this mesmerizing animated film.” Okay, so maybe it wasn’t simple at all.
I had always been drawn to the thumbnail in the past; it featured the severed hand resting on a skull, the picture tinted in a melancholy blue. I’ve always been a sucker for sad socially unacceptable movies. It was time.
I don’t get it. I thought to myself as I groggily closed my Netflix app at 2 a.m. Still, as I drifted into sleep that night, I couldn’t help but think about the underlying message of the film. What did it all mean? Why did it feel like I was missing something? Turns out, I was missing something I didn’t need.
The French film follows Naoufel, a young man who works an unfavorable pizza delivery job and lives with distant (and rude) relatives after the tragic death of his parents. The story simultaneously follows Naoufel’s sentient severed hand in a future timeline, who traverses Paris in an attempt to find and reconnect with its body.
Naoufel becomes infatuated with Gabrielle, a woman whom he doesn’t physically see but delivers pizza to and has an existential conversation with over an intercom. Aww, I guess. He does a little stalking (yikes) and accepts an apprenticeship with her sick uncle, a carpenter named Gigi, to see her more often. This allows him to finally move away from his disgruntled family members. However, he does not tell Gabrielle that he was the one over the intercom.
Naoufel sets up a little date for him and Gabrielle on their terrace. As they sip some drinks, he asks her if she believes in fate — if their lives follow a trajectory that can’t be changed. Before he lets her answer, he tells her how he believes one can conquer fate.
“Do something completely unpredictable and irrational. It’s the only way to counter fate for good…You deviate and you jump on that crane,” he says, pointing to a giant red crane near the roof. “You did it because it was right. It got you somewhere else, and you don’t regret it.”
Moments later, Gabrielle gets angry with Naoufel after she finds out he lied to her and basically took advantage of her sick uncle. He is furious with himself, and when he goes into work the next day, we finally discover how he loses his hand.
Naoufel turns on a jigsaw and begins to cut a piece of wood but is distracted by a fly. He tries to catch it, but his watch catches on the blade; and, well, I don’t have to explain the rest. He passes out and his severed hand drops onto the floor. (Psst. The fly is a motif for fate. Watch the movie for more!)
At the end of the film, Naoufel records himself on cassette tape jumping onto the crane that he mentioned to Gabrielle. In the future, Naoufel has disappeared, and Gabrielle notices the tape lying in the snow. She listens to it and smiles. The hand, watching her from afar (in its own hand-like way, I guess), slowly backs away. Shots of the hand submerging in snow draw parallels with flashbacks to young Naoufel on the beach, his small hand lying in the sand. You almost feel sorry for the hand here (I know it sounds weird, but hear me out) as the memories seem to be precious from its perspective. It almost hurts to see Naoufel abandon it. The final scene shows Naoufel shouting a cry of victory and sitting on the crane, looking out onto the horizon, flurries of snow beginning to trickle from the sky.
I never expected a film about a disembodied hand traveling Paris to be so rich with existential dialogue, motifs and symbolism. So, what’s the real message behind this film? That hinges entirely on the viewer’s relationship with Naoufel.
Naoufel deviates from the typical rom-com protagonist. Instead of getting praised for stalking and lying to Gabrielle and hiding behind the guise of “chivalry,” he loses her (and his hand!) But he didn’t deserve it, right? The man lost his parents, so he deserves the “good ending,” right?
One of the biggest themes in this movie is that you don’t really deserve anything. Naoufel is a good person, but he doesn’t deserve Gabrielle, his job or even his hand. And we don’t deserve to know where he goes when he disappears. He knows all of this by the final scene. “You can’t always win, C’est la vie,” young Naoufel’s father tells him about two minutes into the film.
So often in media it’s implied that we can only grow through relationships with other people who accept us. And, like how this film might not be accepted by people (since a severed hand’s journey to “reconnect” with a wrist may be a tad off-putting), it doesn’t need to be, and neither does Naoufel.
At first, I felt like I was missing something in this film because I expected to see what his destiny was. Perhaps, because it would have been satisfying and given me a sort of reward for putting up with his naivety. But Naoufel ends his story with a healthy selfishness. No reconciliation with his relatives, sick Gigi who graciously took him in or even Gabrielle. He redefines his destiny by leaving behind his past, taking control of fate and writing his future with a changed perspective and newfound happiness. He even leaves us behind, and he doesn’t regret it.
“I Lost My Body” is available to watch on Netflix.
