I Lost My Body was the movie that I decided to watch this week. This films original audio is French and played with English subtitles. (Contains spoilers!)

This movie was a trip. You follow the main character and a severed hand (Spoiler alert) it’s his severed hand. As they move about Paris and go through life. The movie does have repetitive imagery in the use of a fly, and astronaut, a goat, and I’m sure there are more but those are the ones I took notice of.

The movie is set in London. Originally the main character lives with his parents and then is taken in by a different family after his parents die in a car accident. They all dress modernly, all of the characters do; Outfits come in all shapes sizes and colors. There are suits, dresses, hoodies, tee shirts, pants, and work clothes.

Because the movie takes place in a big city, and the times are modern it doesn’t look very different when compared to cities in the U.S. The multiple setting of the movie consists of his family house, his guardians house, the trains/subway, the library, a pizza shop, a carpentry shop, the rooftops of the neighborhood, and an apartment building lobby. There is also the various setting from the point of view of a hand. Most of these are outside or in building that the hand has ended up in while attempting to reunite with Nauofel. The building in the movie, for the most part, are made out of bricks. There is also antenna on top of the roofs, for phone service of cable television.

The food that they eat and mention as well as the beverages they drink are all very common in America. Nauofel works at a pizza shop delivering food. Later in the movie he eats hot dogs and baked bean. Towards the end of the movie Gabriel talks about getting sushi instead of pizza because the pizza ended up getting cold. Again, I think that this is because the movie is set in more modern times.

The characters in the movie are all working class citizens. Nauofel grows up with his parents, they spend a lot of time with him, are very supportive when he tells them he wants to be an astronaut. They teach him how to play and instrument and they enjoy playing them together. Once his parents die, he is taken in by a man and his son. His adopted father is not very close to Nauofel and their only interactions are Nauofel giving him rent and Nauofel telling his adopted father that he is leaving because of a job opportunity. His brother is an angsty teen/ young adult and Nauofel doesn’t have a good relationship with him. Gabrielle is another main character, she meets Nauofel when he delivers a pizza to her one night, after a conversation through a speaker in the lobby Nauofel tracks her down. Gabrielle is a kind young woman who keeps to herself and works at the library. She wears headphones to show that she doesn’t want to really speak with people she doesn’t know. He ends up following her to a carpentry shop and here he meets her uncle. Gabriella takes care of her uncle and brings him medicine. Her uncle ends up giving Nauofel an internship and allows him to learn carpentry. He is a kind man who gives Nauofel a chance to work with him and somewhere to live after finding out that he lost both of his parents.

There are not many cultural differences that I could find. One thing I noticed was that a lot of character smoked cigarettes, the drinking age was younger so we saw some character drinking alcohol that they would be in the United States. In the United States smoking has fades away and I think for my generation is less common. Another thing that I noticed was how the movie focused on music. In the beginning Nauofel’s mother plays the violin and teaches him how to play the piano. Later in the movie a seeing eye dog grabs the severed hand and brings it to an apartment building. The blind man living in the apartment also plays the piano. Music is also represented with Gabrielle wearing headphones and Nauofel using a tape recorder to listen to events from his past.

The similarities are endless, the city landscape, the buildings, the transportation systems (riding bikes, taking the train), the clothes that are worn, all of this is very similar to everything you could see in America.

I enjoyed the movie, but the overall plot was confusing. The values of characters were hard to determine because for some stretched of the movie, we don’t follow the main characters, instead we follow his hand. The main character is obsessed with connecting to Gabrielle, going as far as working for her uncle and waiting weeks to reveal that he knew her from a pizza delivery. His values seem to be love but it’s hard to pin down what really drives the character. After Gabrielle find out he has been doing everything in order to get close to her very upset and reveals that she values family, while questioning Nauaofel’s motives she brings up the fact that her uncle has been struggling with his health and wonders if Nauofel even cares about him or the job opportunity he was given. I definitely recommend watching this movie. It was very interesting and shows that even though London is a city in a different country there a lot of similarities shared between us and them.