Though it begins with its cinematic feet affixed to the ground, French writer-director Jérémy Clapin’s “Meanwhile on Earth,” his moody hybrid follow-up to the lyrical, Oscar-nominated animated feature “I Lost My Body,” soon launches beyond the stratosphere and into outer space. Adrift, Elsa (Megan Northam), a young caregiver with a talent for drawing, looks to the stars for answers about the whereabouts of her older brother Franck (voiced by Sébastien Pouderoux), a cosmonaut who never returned to this planet from a mission. To her shock, the astral void will respond to her pleas — but not without major consequences.
There’s great pleasure in seeing that Clapin’s first alluring foray into live-action filmmaking doesn’t entirely renounce hand-drawn storytelling. Meditative black-and-white animated sequences, where Elsa and Franck interact aboard a spaceship, are interspersed at key instances in the narrative. Even more intriguing, however, is that the wistful tone he evoked in “I Lost My Body” is also the affecting driving force of “Meanwhile on Earth.”
The flesh-and-bone heroine here is a kindred spirit to Naoufel, the young man in Clapin’s animated predecessor. While they are in the prime of their youth, both feel resentful toward fate and struggle to accept their reality after a life-altering tragedy.
There was a memorable dynamism to how the camera moved through the frame in “I Lost My Body,” one which cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert replicates here with swift motion and unconventional framing, turning Elsa’s small French town and the nearby forest into spaces that feel as alien as a landscape on Mars. Jean-Christophe Bouzy’s editing choices, which configure strong visual associations, accentuate the disorienting effect. The beguiling atmosphere is completed through the mysteriously yearning music of composer Dan Levy, who also scored “I Lost My Body.” This comprehensive orchestration of cinematic language does the heavy lifting to immerse the viewer in the otherworldliness of the film’s premise, since the handling of sci-fi elements, while clever, is rather economical: the aliens are never seen, they exist only as a voice.
One night, speaking to the vastness of the sky as if to communicate with her sibling, Elsa hears an answer back through the wind. It’s in fact Franck, asking her to pick up a glowing seed from the ground and insert it in her ear. A group of extraterrestrial entities, whose nameless leader (voiced by Dimitri Doré) is now speaking directly into Elsa’s mind, has Franck hostage. They will return him to Earth if she helps them find a total of five people whose bodies they can take over. The hosts’ consciousnesses will be put to sleep in a perpetual dream. With no other choice, Elsa marks their invisible portal in the woods.
But what do these aliens intend by roaming our planet in a random human body? The answer is fairly simple, though philosophically piercing: they want to feel, to exist for the sake of experiencing life without any ambitions or plans. These amorphous beings are eager to undergo the sensations and routines that most take for granted, providing an enlightening perspective to humanity’s never-ending pursuit of lofty goals. Are those with big plans and the mindset, resources and discipline to accomplish them the only ones whose lives are worth preserving? Or is there value in those who can’t or won’t partake in the rat race, namely the average majority whose time alive may leave no indelible mark?
Elsa’s mission takes on such an ethical conundrum when she must play God, deciding who to sacrifice for the aliens to use as vessels and transmute into physical form. Among the candidates is an elderly woman who no longer remembers her husband, as well as a homeless woman whose circumstances have severed her ties to family. Northam‘s anxiety-fueled performance hinges on her face’s thinly veiled distress, as Elsa’s desperation to complete the task grows (she only has three days before the portal closes). The perceptive actress plays someone whose grief has stunted her desire to pursue a career in the arts. She no longer envisions plans for a fulfilling future, but survives on complacency. Does her despondent demeanor and null motivation make Elsa herself an ideal pick to surrender her life?
Where “Meanwhile on Earth” feels slightly less well rounded is in the acknowledgement of the collective pain that perturbs Elsa’s parents and her younger brother over the loss of Franck. Each of them gets just one emotional scene with her. Still, this sophomore directorial effort proves Clapin’s adept hand for soulful, existentialist tales with an offbeat touch, regardless of the medium he’s creating in. Watching “Meanwhile on Earth” one can see an evolving thematic throughline that connects it with the director’s other work — and not only because the image of an astronaut appears prominently in both movies, as a potent symbol of someone trying to grasp what exists beyond human understanding.
