Meanwhile on Earth, a strange French science fiction drama

Megan Northam in Meanwhile on Earth.
Photo: Metrograph Pictures

In 2019, French animator Jérémy Clapin premiered I lost my bodya strangely moving, melancholic gem of a film about a severed hand that undergoes all kinds of crazy trials as he makes his way through Paris.
The film, released in the US via Netflix, was a critically acclaimed festival hit that succeeded a surprising Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature (ultimately lost to Toy story 4). Clapin’s latest effort, Meanwhile on Earthis largely a live-action drama, but retains the spirit of animation. It’s a beautiful film full of striking compositions and surreal twists, but the volatile story could sometimes have worked better in a more imaginative medium, more open to dreamy abstraction.

The film features an intriguing central role in Megan Northam’s Elsa, a young woman still grieving the loss of her brother Franck, a young French astronaut who went to space and never returned. Elsa works in a nursing home that her mother runs, but she spends her days and nights remembering Franck, injecting F on statues around town, where her brother is something of a local folk hero. This is just a vague premise: aside from her muted graffiti efforts, our protagonist’s sadness manifests itself more as general moodiness than anything particularly tangible. With her large, inward-looking eyes and steady gaze, Northam effectively portrays Elsa’s restless, blinkered life. This is a woman obsessed with something she can never see, hear or feel. But then she starts getting messages in her head suggesting that Franck may still be alive – that he is being held by invisible aliens who want to trade him for human bodies that they can then occupy. We may start to wonder if Elsa is just going crazy, even if some Cronenberg-esque moments of body horror strongly suggest that the aliens are real.

Elsa is determined to get Franck back and tries to do the aliens’ bidding, adding a ticking clock to the story. (Clapin literally switches to a stopwatch at some points.) But the tension is half-hearted and the vague approach to incidents in the picture persists. Certain scenes are shot with real urgency – including one eerie, violent confrontation – while others are presented in an indirect, understated manner with little rhyme or reason. In live-action filmmaking, the tangible nature of the world, its weight and solidity, imposes itself on the viewer’s consciousness; psychologically, we need to understand why scenes are presented the way they are, even if it’s just atmosphere and no real logic. Animation, on the other hand, foregrounds the pictorial, which is its own aesthetic doctrine. To put it another way, animation can get away with a lot more because of its inherent otherworldliness.

Clapin includes some lovely animated sequences, often depicting Elsa’s dreams of reunion with Franck. The contrast is powerful and draws attention to the chimera of her quest. But this also underlines the director’s challenge with the rest of the film. We understand that Elsa must find a way to move through her grief, which is keeping her from moving forward in life. (In addition to working for her mother, she lives with her parents in Franck’s old room.) So her desire to bring her brother back is not only delusional, but also emotionally dangerous. We understand this early on, and we understand that her perception of reality may not have to be taken at face value, which in turn further calls into question much of the film’s already vague narrative. These aren’t all bad things. Clapin has made a film that surprises us but also makes us curious. Where he stumbles is in evoking the emotional charge he is clearly aiming for. Meanwhile on Earth is beautiful, but alienating.