An intimate science fiction film
With her head in the stars and her feet on the ground, something is happening in Elsa’s (Megan Northam) body and heart. Up there, in the vastness of space, her astronaut brother has disappeared. On Earth, her monotonous life as a caregiver in an EHPAD fuels her unsatisfied grief with a sad loneliness. At the dawn of her adult life, it is her brother’s death that crushes and immobilizes him. No plans, no relationships or very few, no real past and future… Until the day Elsa hears a voice. A voice (Dimitri Doré) that presents itself as that of an extraterrestrial existence and that offers her a pact. This voice explains to her that “they” can bring her brother back, if she brings them other “lives” in exchange…
After the wonderful I lost my bodyJérémy Clapin directs his first live action feature film, Meanwhile on Earth. However, he does not completely abandon the animated cinema that revealed him, since his new film also offers some beautiful animated sequences. There is therefore a continuity, in form but also in substance, with this fundamental question the absence. Who are we without all or part of our bodies? Is anyone truly dead (or alive) until the sight of their bodies provides proof? Wanting to save her brother from his undecided fate, does Elsa want to decide her own as well?
Megan Northam’s revelation
Megan Northam plays Elsa, and from her first leading role in the cinema her charisma seems unlimited. She offers Jérémy Clapin wonderful settings and situations. Closer to his ear that hears this voice, to his eyes where a multitude of sensations are deciphered. Elsa is charming, she is attentive, but she is also disturbing and cold, and the pain that she cannot shake off physically transforms into an extreme tension that contaminates the entire film from her body.
Body and mind crossed by contradictions, unformulated desires and explosions, the young actress is present in almost all the shots of Meanwhile on Earth, which entrusts its overall truthfulness to her interpretation. The gamble is largely successful, as Megan Northam proves captivating. And while he captures the light, proof of his ability to be whole without selfishness, he also allows others to exist fully. Special mention then for the actress and dancer Sabine Timoteo, always incredibly intense in her performances.
A great story of poetic initiation
Meanwhile on Earth it is a real cinematic film, and an excellent one, because it could not be anything. Not a book, not a painting, not a song, but a cinematic work in which the lights and sounds constitute the indescribable and overwhelming sensation of a story that manages to connect the infinitely large to the infinitely small, the immensity of space to the infinitely small. the smallness of life on earth.
What Elsa is going through, the painful mourning of her brother and her passage through him into adulthood, can be understood in the interstitial space located between her real life – in the real shots – and her dreamed life, among the stars with her brother, in animated sequences. And this space, poetic and immaterial but very sensitive, separates these two lives as underlined the tragic impossibility of each.
Meanwhile on Earth looks at himself, but he also has to listen to himself, to fully recompose this mental space in which he takes us. There is therefore a fantastic work on sound and music (Dan Levy), and in this sense Meanwhile on Earthin addition to the writing of his female character, resonates Under the skin by Jonathan Glazer.
Jérémy Clapin’s film, very successful in its images, is also successful in the emotion and doubt it instills. The true story of an alien invasion or the mental escape of a young girl overwhelmed by pain? Science fiction film or psychological drama? Meanwhile on Earthlet these two perspectives coexist together, framed by an introduction in space and a conclusion on the ocean shore: it is in fact a spatial and intimate vertigo, of an oceanic force, that strikes in front of this beautiful film.
Meanwhile on Earth by Jérémy Clapin, in theaters from July 3, 2024. Above is the trailer.
Source: Cine Serie
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