Grief is a concept that everyone with a heart can relate to, but it’s not always something that everyone with a brain can deal with. Riffing on Jean Cocteau’s 1950 classic Orphée and giving it a very modern makeover, French writer-director Jérémy Clapin explores that very paradox with Meanwhile on Earth, a strange, poetic, and endearingly surreal meditation on the counterintuitive ways in which we react when confronted with loss.
In a very literal way, Clapin has been here before, with his acclaimed and surprisingly poignant 2019 animated film I Lost My Body, in which the disembodied hand of a pizza delivery boy goes on a journey to find the rest of itself. This much more cryptic follow-up pushes the notion a whole lot further, and whether it works or not will be in the eye of the beholder.
The loss this time is felt by Elsa (Megan Northam), who is mourning the disappearance of her brother, Franck. Franck was an astronaut, who appears to have vanished in similar circumstances to the mysterious fate that befell David Bowie’s Major Tom in the song “Space Oddity”. Elsa is a talented artist but, like the rest of her family, she can’t now seem to move on. A temporary job working at a nursing home, run by her mother, seems to have somehow become permanent, and so she moons around at home, writing bandes dessinées (comic books) that come to life in otherworldly — and exquisitely rendered — pen-and-ink interruptions that pop up throughout the film.
Things change when she spends a night out stargazing with her little brother, and she starts to hear voices, the first being Franck’s. They encourage her to put a seed in her ear in order for her to commune with them — yes, really, it’s that kind of film — and Elsa’s brain is then psychically connected with a nebulous band of alien creatures. Right away they say they have now “deactivated” Franck, and they tell Elsa that she can have her brother back only if she brings them five human bodies for them to occupy (“No one will ever know we were among you”). Elsa is skeptical at first, but, after being led into some nearby woods by these disembodied voices, she starts to get their drift.
This turning point involves a chainsaw, lots of blood, and the inhabitation of the first human vessel, but the spirit voices raise the stakes; getting impatient, they set a time limit for Franck’s return and demand four more suitable human hosts. Elsa goes into meltdown, and the film sort of does too, as she wrestles with the literal cost of getting her brother back. Are some lives worth less than others?
It’s to the director’s credit that this actually plays out as serious human drama, although a lot of that has to do with its star, Megan Northam, who holds it all together with a mixture of surface strength and inner vulnerability like a brass-knuckle Léa Seydoux. Such an audacious juggling of the emotionally real and the downright odd doesn’t always work, though, and the non-committal ending is something of a cop-out in that way. It does, however, pay off on a gut level in its depiction of pain. Whether any part of this story is objectively “real” or not: planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing we can do.
Title: Meanwhile on Earth
Festival: Berlin (Panorama)
Sales agent: Charades
Director/screenwriter: Jérémy Clapin
Cast: Megan Northam, Catherine Salée, Sam Louwyck, Roman Williams, Sofia Lesaffre
Running time: 1 hr 28 min
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