I Lost My Body is Dull and Clichéd
Another day, another Netflix movie. This one caught me by surprise. Not because I Lost My Body is a particularly good animated film, but because every half-assed decision in the movie is clichéd, incredibly pedantic and dull, which can very well make it 2019’s most overatted and overhyped film.
The film tells a rather simple love story between pizza-delivery stalker Naoufel (Hakim Faris) and Gabrielle (Victoire Du Bois). Problem #1 arises. The film’s story is way too simple and goes down the motions of typical, clichéd, romantic dramas that have been done 1000000000 other times, and better too. There’s nothing remotely engaging in Naoufel and Gabrielle’s faux-relationship that you couldn’t care less about what’s going down on-screen. They are both badly developed, one-dimensional, characters who don’t seem to be legitimately engaged in one another, which is why their romance never works. The only scene that works between the two is when Naoufel arrives 40-minutes later than he’s supposed to be for pizza delivery and they talk about literally anything that’s going on in life. It’s the only real sign of human emotion you’ll find in I Lost My Body.
Since the characters are incredibly dull and one-dimensional, the plot is also mega-clichéd. Due to the MOLE in the hand, you know exactly that the hand that’s been wondering around is Naoufel’s. The emotional attachment you’re supposed to have with him is lost, because you know exactly he’s going to lose his hand. When you find out how that happens, you don’t feel any remorse, but actually believe he deserved it, as he was being an extreme creep to Gabrielle. He literally stalks her, gets a job working for her Uncle just to make sure she falls in love with him. As the Joker said, “You get what you fuckin’ deserve”. Problem #2: The story is too clichéd for its own good. You follow the beats of the “movie relationship”. The two characters seem to have “things in common”, but they are so dull that it seems they aren’t compatible with each other. Naoufel stalks Gabrielle and then, to top it all off, LIES about his previous work to impress her with a PIZZA to tell her that it was him all along. Guess what happened next? The scene plays off as incredibly awkward and embarassingly cringey. It’s even more cringey if you watch it in its original language (French) and understand the language fluently to know exactly what’s wrong.
Critics will want you to believe that I Lost My Body is a “sweet, heartfelt” and “at times bizarre” film on a “romance that blossoms”, but it’s none of that. I Lost My Body is a tone-deaf, bizarrely inhuman film about one incompetent nitwit and his uninterestingly ordinary crush not-really “falling in love” and, when his stalker-ass gets owned by his so-called “crush”, loses his hand. Sure, the animation is well-done, like many hand-drawn animated films and there are some visually interesting sequences. Virtually every frame is a true work of art and every scene involving the sole hand is visually interesting. There are glimpses of something that goes beyond the realm of clichéd, but it never lasts. It could’ve been something more, but it never leaps to the unpredictable and the original, it stays in very formulaic, pedantically clichéd territory, and for that reason alone, I hated almost every single second of it. I Lost My Body is the most overrated film of the year.
✯½
