A poignant tale involving a severed hand roaming through Paris in search of its owner was the focus of Jérémy Clapin’s 2019 movie titled ‘I Lost My Body’. Starting its theater run in the United States through Netflix, the movie succeeded in securing a nomination for the Academy Award in the best-animated feature film category but lost to Movie 4.
The animation might have been the spirit of this film, however, it was mostly a live-action drama in the form of Clapin’s latest work, ‘Meanwhile on Earth’. In the domain of live-action films, this one is on the more elegant side. It is well crafted with well-put camera work but a lot of the time the vision is lost and captured a bit too’ real’ as opposed to more dreamlike.
The movie stars a French astronaut in space, Franck, who never came back to earth, and his sister, Elsa Northam, who still mourns her brother. Northam’s portrayal of Elsa in the film does receive some praise as Northam emulates a restless yet very passive woman who barely emotes.
This sister does indeed idolize her younger brother, turning him into a local folk hero by spray painting F all around town. Nobody has even paid Elsa any attention despite the wacky stunts Northam pulled in this film. Geisha The Movie sadly fails to establish her character apart from these trait marks. Elsa hardly gets any screen time making it repetitively hard to believe that she is deeply mourning her brother’s death. Instead, it becomes so mundane that barely even a hint of sincerity exists in any given shot.
Along with the negatives, the film does establish some strong Cronenberg-esque moments by highlighting inhumanity turning this science fiction into horror. Taking into account that it’s a new movie, it has some appeal to those who fancy romance between intergalactic aliens.
In an attempt to fulfill the demands of the aliens to bring Franck back, Elsa explains that there is a slight quality of a clock ticking. (Clapin switches to a stopwatch at points). Still, the suspense is rather lackadaisical and the supposed focusing vision of the film is quite erratic. The impression of urgency is created in some scenes one includes a gory and abusive fight sequence and in others, there seems to be no logic behind oblique and subtle shots. In watching live-action films it is the world’s tangible and granular aspect, its mass and density, that impresses one’s mind; from a psychological perspective, we have to understand why a scene is constructed in this or that way even if it’s not a reason but merely a mood. However, in animation one can picture what needs to be pictorialised and it is in itself a set philosophy. In other words, there are much more liberties in animation due to its extraterrestrial nature.
Clapin does include some beautiful animated segments, frequently featuring Elsa’s dreams of being with Franck. The contrast is stunning and makes her undertaking appear more dreamlike than it is. But this also reiterates the difficulty faced by the director regarding the rest of the film. Elsa has, as we are made to apprehend, a dead brother with whom she has to reconcile her emotions to be able to go ahead with her life. (Other than working for her mother, she stays at her parents’ house in the room of Franck.) So, her desire to restore her brother’s life becomes not only absolutely unrealistic but also extremely dangerous. We get all this much earlier and we get that her view of the world is a little bit different and therefore it does not make sense to treat what is shown in the film as a photographic image of reality which puts into question a lot of things in the rather foggy narrative of the film. There is a perspective in this articulation that I think does not exist in the universe of Russian literature and culture. Clapin has produced a work that makes one a little bemused but rather inquisitive. Why he fails is in creating the intensity he so obviously desires. On the other hand, While on Earth is lovely, it’s cut off.
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