In the week that saw the release of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman , two films from the 2019 Cannes Film Festival landed on Netflix. And, surprisingly, both of them are directed by debutants – well, these are their feature-length debuts. I’m talking about Jérémy Clapin’s animated French film, I Lost My Body , and, Mati Diop’s Wolof (a West African language) romantic drama, Atlantics .
The connections don’t end there as both the movies have won top prizes at the same film festival. Again, they’re thematically linked since they involve supernatural elements. While I Lost My Body has a severed hand looking for its body as though it has got a mind and a pair of eyes, Atlantics features the spirits of dead people in all their glory. The objective of these features isn’t to scare the audience. They’re not horror films as such even though there are some scenes that take your breath away. Plus, their recipes include a pinch of good old-fashioned romance.
They may not be instantly likeable and some viewers might not take the subjects like a duck takes to water, but these are films that’ll live long as inspirations for generations to come. Along with the idea of a hand looking for its body, Clapin, parallelly, shows how the protagonist, Naofel (voiced by Hakim Faris) loses his hand. You do get a sense, from the very beginning, that Naofel might get his hand accidentally chopped off, but until you get to the point where it actually happens, it’s a roller-coaster ride. The hand escapes from the lab, in which it has been stored, and then travels the length and breadth of the city to reach him. And it’s not a simple journey either, for it has to fight off hungry rodents and fall down from great heights. It, sometimes, feels like the hand is having more adventures than any of the real characters on screen.
Their recipes include a pinch of the good old-fashioned romance with some horror
And, in another timeline, Naofel begins to work as a carpenter to get closer to the woman of his dreams, Gabrielle (voiced by Victoire Du Bois). The dialogues and characters are all minimal here. These aspects make sure that your focus isn’t unevenly distributed. And, since they beautifully add surrealistic bits to the proceedings, you won’t mind the absence of lovey-dovey actions. The protagonists are, probably, in their teens. It’s usually the age that makes people go weak in the knees when they find themselves in the same room as their crushes.
Although Naofel stalks her initially, his intention is only to befriend her, and, not to harm her as Joe (Penn Badgley) does in the Netflix series You . There are some poignant moments and junctures that are totally devoid of the female lead in I Lost My Body , and the same holds good for Atlantics .
In Diop’s movie, the people who die in the sea (construction workers) come back to demand the money they are owed from their boss. But there’s a little twist in the way they choose to come back – the men’s spirits take possession of the women’s bodies. They never abuse their boss physically, but they do ask him to dig graves for them at the cemetery. It’s eerily funny to look at a millionaire do a shoddy job that involves manual labor. Hence, a man, who’s in the body of a woman, comments, “Every time you look at the top of the tower (which they’ve built), you’ll think of our unburied bodies at the bottom of the ocean.”
This film, too, has two twenty-somethings looking for a piece of love at the bottom of its heart. Despite the grandness of subtlety in the rich versus poor political discourse it aims to zoom in on, the thread that deals with Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) and Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) absolutely feels like home territory for the director. Since Souleiman also dies in the sea, he comes back in the form of a male cop to make love to his girlfriend, and, so, the lines between the real and the supernatural keep getting blurred as the tale inches towards its climax.
I hope that Netflix, too, likewise blurs the lines between epics and art-house films and seriously promotes the latter to sustain the movement.
