The announcement of Academy Award nominations was the first I'd heard of this Netflix-adopted feature. I didn't bother to learn much about it in advance. The title told me to expect drama, and I knew it was foreign if not French.
Oddly enough, the "I" of the title refers to an entity incapable of verbal communication: a severed right hand that has mysteriously taken on a life of its own. (This isn't a backstory for the Addams Family's Thing; the skin's too dark.) Retaining more than just muscle memory, it sneaks out of a lab fridge in search of the rest of its body, a young man named Naoufel (Dev Patel in the English dubbing). Scattered throughout the movie are flashbacks in the life of Naoufel, the early ones appearing in black and white, often with a camera focus on his hand.
Naoufel was a loser in general long before he lost a hand. I don't mean to make fun of him; his story's rather sad. He sees his parents die during his childhood, his new family is unloving, and he abandons his dreams of being a pianist and an astronaut. In adulthood, his bad luck and/or clumsiness may cost him his pizza delivery job. But his intercom conversation with Gabrielle (Alia Shawkat), a customer who never comes to the door (it makes some sense in context), sparks a hopeful infatuation. After digging up information, he talks her woodworking uncle into taking him on as an apprentice, making it easy to meet her regularly.
Of course, I'm not sure which approach is less likely to succeed: telling her up front that he was the delivery failure or keeping it a secret until a key moment. Naoufel never strikes me as a smart guy. Nor a particularly virtuous one, that stalker. Better than his foster brother, but still.
If one thing stands out about Naoufel, it's his philosophy. He tells Gabrielle he'd like to be somewhere with nothing much to see or hear, such as the Arctic. He also tells her a theory that the only way to escape the constraints of fate is to do something uncharacteristic and risky. I guess that's why he adopted such an unorthodox courtship method.
This being a mostly realistic (in both writing and visual quality) drama apart from the hand, it's also one of the least family-friendly animated features I've ever seen. Technically, it's TV-MA; I added the "R-rated" tag for simplicity. Characters swear now and then, and we get a brief glimpse of gratuitous sex for no plot-important reason. At least the severing scene was, well, cut short.
So, back to the hand. Apparently, it can see as well as think. It's pretty resourceful in dodging urban dangers. I'm not sure how easily it can "die," and it doesn't acquire visible injuries beyond the wrist, but it has the sort of fears you might expect. It makes a point not to be seen by humans past infancy, at least not long enough to cause panic. In the end, it doesn't even show itself to Naoufel when it has the chance. Probably just as well; the poor guy doesn't need a heart attack.
Still, that raises a big question: What's the point?! I never expected an explanation of how the hand came alive, but how does its life truly figure into the rest of the plot, or even just the moral? To me, it feels like two really different 40-minute shorts mashed together, never with a satisfying intersection. Maybe the writer had planned on separate animations but decided that one or both couldn't sell alone. Neither plot's ending is much of an ending, either.
I might approve this level of bizarreness and confusion if ILMB were at least partly comedic. Instead, it's just artistic in the most dubious way. I'm a little more tolerant of the few moments when Naoufel or his hand perceives or remembers something presumably imaginary, such as an astronaut standing by. They're jarring, to be sure, but explicable.
I don't blame the Academy for nominating something out of the ordinary. But it sure makes me feel better about Toy Story 4 winning.
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