The Nobodies

One morning Lily and Ben wake up side by side and neither of them is in their own body. In the spare room there is a small girl, or rather the mind of a small girl in the body of a tall bearded man. She tries to explain who she is. What follows is a journey in which bodies and identities keep changing places. Raphaël Descraques directs, wrote the script with his friends and acts in it. It was made by the trio called Suricate: Descraques, Vincent Tirel and Julien Josselin, who had been making absurd comedy for the internet for years. Its distribution was unusual. Produced by Golden Moustache, it was released free on YouTube in 2015 and never went to cinemas or television. It is among the first cases in France of internet comedy moving into a feature, and it started an argument at the time about whether a film made for the internet counts as a film. It runs about seventy five minutes. The body swapping is used for comedy, but the narrative turns at a certain point to identity; the question of how much the body you are in changes you is taken seriously by the end. The budget was low and it shows; there are no effects, the locations are few, and everything is left to the acting and the edit. Who it is for: anyone curious about French internet comedy and low budget genre experiments. Who it is not for: the humour belongs to a particular audience, the acting is amateur, and the narrative scatters in the middle.