Upon my soul

Given that nobody knows that he is at the hotel, Roland is further rattled when the house phone rings and the anonymous caller asks specifically for him, but when he takes the call he’s met only with silence. A sudden blackout alarms everyone except the innkeeper, for whom this appears to be another common occurrence, but when the lights come back on, Roland discovers that his preciously guarded parcel has vanished, which throws him into an accusatory panic. Although still distressed, he eventually calms down and agrees to tell the others the story of how he lost his hand and what brought him to this remote location.

All of the above and more is covered in a busily textured and waste-free ten minutes of screen time, with much of the rest of the story unfolding as a lengthy flashback that eventually circles back to Roland’s arrival at the Hôtel de L’Abbaye. His tale begins back when he was a struggling artist bristling with ideas for paintings that no gallery was interested in exhibiting. One day, when looking to buy a pair of gloves to feature in a future painting, he hits it off with newly employed saleswoman Irène (Josseline Gaël), who agrees to model for him, and in no time at all the two are a couple. A short while later, however, Irène has become weary of Roland’s lack of ambition and failure to find success, and in a restaurant one evening she breaks up with him and leaves. As Roland sits alone in a despondent stupor, he is approached by the establishment’s chef, who tells him of a talisman that transformed his fortune that he is willing to sell to Roland for the paltry sum of one sou (effectively, a penny). Sceptical though he initially is, Roland nonetheless follows the chef upstairs, despite being loudly warned not to buy the talisman by the kitchen hand as he does so. The talisman in question turns out to be a severed left hand, one that responds to commands issued to it by the chef, and is stored in a box that is the exact shape of the parcel that Roland was carrying when he entered the Hôtel de L’Abbaye. The chef explains how his culinary skills were completely transformed by his ownership of the talisman and how its power is transmuted into the left hand of anyone who possesses it, a claim he has already slyly demonstrated by casually rolling a cigarette with a single graceful movement of his own left hand. He admits to Roland that that he’s now desperate to sell because if he fails to do so before he dies, his soul will spend eternity in hell. It’s a claim that the still cynical Roland does not take seriously, even though we all know he absolutely should. When the chef starts talking enthusiastically about how the talisman could awaken previously unseen skills in an artist, however, Roland becomes intrigued enough to purchase it from the wildly grateful chef.

With the talisman in hand, Roland then heads for home, but his attempt to take a horse-drawn taxi hits a wall when the horse bolts as soon as he opens the cab door. He thus elects to walk, and when pestered by a persistent sex worker (again, this film was made in 1943…) he rebuffs her approaches and is challenged by her burly pimp, whom he knocks cold with a single punch with his left hand. When he enters his apartment, his dog runs away in fear, and almost without realising he rolls a cigarette using the exact same one-handed technique previously employed by the chef. He crashes out and sleeps in late the next morning but wakes to find that he has painted a whole string of darkly themed pictures that he has no memory of creating. They nonetheless impress the hell out of Irène, who apparently wasn’t serious about leaving him after all and is convinced that reputable art dealer named Gibelin (Guillaume de Sax) will buy them, despite his having never shown an ounce of enthusiasm for any of Roland’s work before. Buy them he does, and in no time at all things start really looking up for the painter, and all would be well were it not for the ordinary-looking little man (Palau) who keeps popping up to smilingly remind Roland of the potential consequences of the deal he didn’t even realise he had made.