Grief is a common human experience that isn’t always rational. French writer director Jérémy Clapin takes a cue from Jean Cocteau’s 1950 masterpiece Orphée for Meanwhile on Earth, a modern-day update of the myth that’s strange, poetic and charmingly surreal about how we react to loss in counterintuitive ways. Clapin has been here before, quite literally. Last year’s acclaimed animated feature I Lost My Body was an unexpectedly moving film about a pizza delivery boy whose severed hand goes off in search of the rest of himself. This follow-up is even more oblique, and whether it works or not is very much up to the viewer. The person feeling the loss this time around is Elsa (Megan Northam), who mourns her brother Franck. An astronaut who seems to have disappeared under similar circumstances as David Bowie’s Major Tom in “Space Oddity,” he has like the rest of her family become stuck.
A temporary gig at her mother’s nursing home appears to have taken on permanence, she mopes around their flat drawing bandes dessinées (comic books) that are interrupted by otherworldly and exquisitely rendered pen-and-ink intrusions. Then she hears voices after going out stargazing with her little brother one night. The first one belongs to Franck, who tells her that she needs to put a seed in her ear so she can talk to him yes, really and then Elsa’s brain becomes psychically connected with some sort of cosmic chorus line of alien creatures. They say they’ve now “deactivated” Franck, they explain that if she brings them five human bodies (“No one will ever know we were among you”), she can have him back. At first she balks at this idea but, after being led into some nearby woods by these disembodied voices, its logic starts to sink in.
This turning point involves a chainsaw, blood and so much blood but spirit voices are what truly raise the stakes. Impatient for Franck’s return, they give him a deadline and demand four more hosts. Elsa freaks out, and so does the movie: She grapples with the actual cost of bringing her brother back. Are some lives worth less than others?
It’s a testament to the director that this still plays as serious human drama, Megan Northam has a lot to do with that. Anchoring it all with surface strength and inner fragility, she’s like a brass knuckle Léa Seydoux. But such an audacious blend of emotionally real and downright weird doesn’t always take, and the non-committal ending is kind of a cop-out in that regard. Still, it pays off on a gut level when it comes to pain. Whether any part of this story is objectively “real” or not, its feelings are: planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing we can do.
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