"I Lost My Body" is an urban "odyssey" with a broken hand, and it is also a short-lived spiritual journey of the owner Nauffel to find himself. The director does not give the story a happy ending, the severed hand leaves the body, Nauffel also disappears into the snowy night, everything will continue, Sisyphus pushes the boulder of fate slowly forward.
In May 2019, French director Jérémy Clapin won the Critics' Week award at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival for his first animated feature film, J'ai perdu moncorps. Combining poetry with imagination, the film was released to great acclaim in France, with critics asserting that "we will witness the birth of a great filmmaker". Adapted from Guillaume Laurant's novel Happy Hand, the film differs from the novel's linear narrative, with the protagonist Nauffel and his severed hand cross-narrated: on the one hand, the broken hand is an adventure in the steel jungle of Paris in order to find the master; on the other hand, the director uses cross-montages to outline Nauffel's doomed life - losing his parents in a car accident at an early age, being fostered in his uncle's house, and having a poor family education. He failed to become a pianist or an astronaut, but a hand-in-waiting delivery man. Because of a late order, he meets Gabriel, but the hard courtship only buys her cold eyes. Eventually, an operational error caused him to lose his right hand.
Poster of "I Lost My Body"
The film takes the broken hand accident as the narrative origin, and the two story lines return to this origin in a straight narrative and flashback respectively, but the title of the film is not named "I lost my right hand" from Nauffel's point of view, but "I lost my body" in the tone of the broken hand. The director admits to having thought of other names before that, "'I lost a hand', 'I found my body', 'I sawed my hand', but still wanted to keep the theme of the hand's perspective". From novel to film, the focus of the narrative shifts from Nauffel to the broken hand. In the original work, Nauffel clashed with his cousin, held accountable for the broken hand accident, and Naufer retaliated against him, etc., were deleted and replaced by stream-of-consciousness memories of the broken hand. "Looking" is what the two narrative lines have in common: the broken hand looking for the body, and the Neufer looking for Gabriel. Two narrative lines intersect in the subway of Paris. The severed hand was pushed off the platform by the drunk, and the roaring subway almost crushed it to pieces, and the giant rats that grew in the subway used it as a plate. Under the enemy's belly and back, he picked up the discarded lighter with a broken hand, forced the rats back with the light of the fire, and grabbed the subway handle and successfully escaped. The camera turns to the subway, where Naufer follows Gabriel onto the subway, but does not have the courage to sit in the empty seat next to her, and can only silently watch her back a few steps away. When the subway arrived, Gabriel got off, Nauffel hesitated for a moment and rushed out of the carriage, but could not find a trace of Gabriel. The subway behind him leaves the platform, and the narrative time and space shift again. The scarred severed hand struggled to grasp the iron fence next to the platform, and his head cut away from the view of the broken hand, and an abandoned building stood out in the moonlight.
Stills from "I Lost My Body"
In the "Odyssey" of self-searching, Nauffel is equated with the broken hand, and the body becomes a metaphor for subjectivity. The adult Neufer appears as a figure on his back, while he is enduring scolding from the pizzeria owner, and after a mechanical apology, a city montage shows his journey home: the dense underground of Paris, the rows of buildings, in the modern metropolis, Nauffel's figure is getting smaller and smaller, and his face is as tired as the indifferent masses in the subway. At this time, he became a symbol, annihilated in the daily life of the city. As a "small part" of modern life, Naufer is in "a very 'burn-out' state", and after heavy work, "what remains is the complete fragmentation of the postmodern self-body and mental dismemberment". [3] His subjectivity is consumed in the trivial and repetitive daily life. The director uses a broken hand accident to visualize the loss of human subjectivity, and both Naufer and the broken hand are mutilated "parts" in modern society.
In the steel jungle of the city, there is no complete "person", let alone a complete "home". "There are no homes in Paris. Residents of big cities live in layers of boxes. ...... The connection between home and space becomes artificial. In this connection everything is mechanical, and the inner life disappears completely from there. [4] Gaston Bashira wrote in The Poetics of Space. The concept of "home" remains only in Nauffel's childhood memories, the real-life uncle's house is just a dormitory, and the uncle's indifference and cousin's domineering make Nauffel's private space limited to a small mattress. "Children without a bedroom run to their corners and curl up"[5], but Naufer didn't even have room to curl up, and he could only paint igloos on the steam from the windows to remember the home in his memory. Similarly, a severed hand strays into someone else's home in search of a body. Metaphorically, the owners of the two houses are blind and infants, the former invisible and the latter speechless. Whether it is the house of his uncle who stayed in Nauffel or the home where he broke his hand, the home is no longer a shelter, but just a man-made space. But this did not inhibit Nauffel and the broken hand's yearning for home, because space can always replace time to stir up memories of the past. In the sound of a blind pianist, the broken hand "sitting" on the frame fantasizes that the player is Nauffel, and the mutilated severed limb gazes at the subject; in the baby's bedroom, the broken hand picks up the pacifier and puts it back in the baby's mouth, the baby holds the broken hand to sleep, and then the broken hand "dreams" of the memory of the body. Home space gives displaced people a sense of security, and it becomes the entire universe. In this universe, Neufer found the shadow of subjectivity. After meeting Gabriel, he decided to build an "igloo" to inject imagination into the boring life and fill the emptiness of the loss of subjectivity, and the "igloo" made of wooden planks became the end of the journey of the broken hand.
In this journey to find self and home, sound is the only clue. Nauffel loved recording since childhood, and one of his childhood ideals was to become a pianist, and his parents were also musicians. In the gray of his life, it was Gabriel's voice that lit him up, making him cross the distance of 35 floors and fall in love with a strange woman. In addition, the sound of grass and trees blowing, the sound of snow falling, the sound of rain, and the noise of the city are also presented in detail, "listening" is the best way to touch the city, and the only way to reach the memory. Naufer's only spiritual pillar in the film is several tapes of childhood. Sound is a flowing memory, and all kinds of childhood experiences come to mind. At the end of the film, a crippled Nauffel lies in bed, listening to the last tape of his childhood repeatedly, recording the car accident that changed his life. The cause of the car accident was not the deer that suddenly broke out, but the naughty self: the father did not have time to react in order to prevent the dangerous action of sticking the microphone out of the window, which led to the tragedy. Ironically, it was because he stuck the microphone out of the window that he recorded the entire process of the car accident. Pain, remorse, anger, and many emotions are integrated into Naufer's repeated pressing of the replay button. The broken hand stared at the body from a distance, just as Naufer stared into the past, but he could not re-intervene in childhood. Because childhood in recollection is black and white, it is past tense and inactivated compared to the reality of color. Like a broken hand, even if the body is close at hand, it cannot be connected to it, and the scab of the wound separates the two sections that are one. The film ends with Nauffel jumping in, leaving Gabriel with a tape recorder, and the sound records the whole process of his jump to the crane, but also leaves the audience with a question - where will Naufer, who says goodbye to everything, go? All clues are like a broken hand in the snow that is silently hidden. The hand that searched for the body found the body, but could not connect with the body, so did the crippled Neufer finally find the lost self and home? The camera scans the tattered wooden "igloo" on the roof, and apparently he can't find it.
Obviously, "I Lost My Body" is not a fairy tale of dreams in Paris. Beneath the dreamy exterior of the surrealism of the broken hand is a deformed reality. The film is set in Paris, but the viewer will not be able to see the beautiful paris scenery in a short adventure. [6] The director places the camera 80 centimeters away from the broken hand, "at this distance, the viewer feels like they are on the border of observation and intervention". Paris is so dirty and dilapidated in the eyes of the broken hand: the night in Paris is made up of dead pigeons in dumpsters, rats in the subway, and garbage in the park; the roadblocks and fences of the construction team are like gangrene on the city's veins; the main road is blocked with the honking of cars and the insults of pedestrians. Paris in the eyes of the broken hand is no longer a fashion capital, but the evil capital of Baudelaire's writing: "Crowded city!" A city full of dreams, where ghosts pull pedestrians in the daytime! [7] Such a city could not conceive fairy tales, and the dream-seeking journey between Broken Hands and Neufer could only end in failure.
Director Clapan has no intention of being silent in helplessness and futile lamentations, and he concludes the tragedy with an absurd ending. Neufer left behind a tape recorder that symbolized memories and said goodbye to Gabriel. In the midst of the snow and ice, he jumped onto the crane next to the abandoned building and let out a triumphant cheer, followed by a long silence, and the sound stopped abruptly, and Naufer disappeared into Gabriel's life like a broken hand hidden in the snow. Instead of jumping off a tall building to end his life, Nauffel embarked on a new path—life doesn't end because of bad luck, and the wheel of fate is still spinning. In the film, Gabriel once asks Naufer this question: "If you changed your destiny, what would you do?" The latter's answer is worth pondering: "You don't change your destiny because of what you can save." You bow your head and cross your hands. "Changing fate is a false proposition. The severed hand traveled through a painstaking journey, but was finally blocked by a thin gauze; Naufer took pains to please his sweetheart, but was rejected for a joke. Like Sisyphus, who pushed the boulder, everything was put back to square one and was lost. At this time, Camus's words are still in the ear, "Sisyphus is happy", and Naufer should also be happy.
In the postmodern context, man is no longer human, and the crippled person cannot regain subjectivity, but can only live in a disorderly world in a state of "non-self". In contemporary Sisyphus mythology, the boulder hanging high above the head is no longer the punishment of the gods, but a trivial daily life, and the aimless cycle makes people gradually lose the subjectivity of "people" and eventually become a machine. Loss, likewise, is the epitome of the first half of Nauffel's life, and the departure of his parents, lovers, ideals, and even hands as part of the body is naturally a tragedy of fate; but the absurd life is a tragedy for the unknowing, but a comedy for the self-aware. After going through all the things of life, Naufer finally saw the absurdity of life, he no longer "imagined the earth too much on memories", and no longer "too eager to hope for happiness"[8], at this moment, he quietly examined his life, suffering did not leave him, but he was at least the master of his own life. In the snow of Paris, contemporary Sisyphus continues to propel the boulders of destiny.