Meanwhile, on Earth …

In 2019, the French animator Jérémy Clapin premiered I Lost My Body, an oddly touching, melancholy little gem of a movie about a severed hand undergoing all sorts of crazy ordeals as it makes its way across Paris.
Released in the U.S. via Netflix, the film was a critically acclaimed festival hit that managed a surprise Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature (losing eventually to Toy Story 4). Clapin’s latest effort, Meanwhile on Earth, is a largely live-action drama, but it retains the spirit of animation. It’s a gorgeous movie filled with striking compositions and surreal turns — but the glancing story at times might have worked better in a more fanciful medium, one more welcoming to dreamy abstraction.

The film does feature an intriguing central performance 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 came back. Elsa works at a nursing home her mom runs, but her days and nights are spent memorializing Franck, spray-painting F on statues around town, where her brother is a kind of local folk hero. This is a wisp of a premise — aside from her muted graffiti efforts, our protagonist’s grief manifests itself more as general moodiness than anything particularly tangible. With her big inward eyes and perpetual glower, Northam effectively conveys 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 unseen aliens who want to trade him for human bodies they can then occupy. We may start to wonder if Elsa is simply losing her mind, even though some Cronenberg-esque moments of body horror strongly suggest the aliens are real.

Determined to bring Franck back, Elsa begins trying to do the aliens’ bidding, which adds a slight ticking-clock quality to the narrative. (Clapin literally cuts to a stopwatch at points.) But the suspense is half-hearted, and the picture’s vaporous approach to incident remains. Certain scenes are filmed with genuine urgency — including one grisly, violent confrontation — while others are presented in oblique, understated fashion with little rhyme or reason. In live-action filmmaking, the tactile nature of the world, its weight, its solidity, presses itself upon the viewer’s consciousness; psychologically, we need to grasp why scenes are presented as they are, even if it’s just a vibe rather than genuine logic. By contrast, animation 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 does incorporate some lovely animated sequences, often involving Elsa’s dreams about reuniting with Franck. The contrast is powerful, drawing attention to the chimerical nature of her quest. But this also underscores the director’s challenge with the rest of the film. Elsa, we understand, must find a way through her grief, which is preventing her from moving forward in life. (Besides working for her mom, she lives at her parents’ home in Franck’s old room.) Thus, her desire to bring her brother back is not just delusional but emotionally perilous. We understand this early on, and we understand that her perception of reality might not need to be taken at face value, which in turn throws much of the film’s already vague narrative into further question. These aren’t all bad things. Clapin has made a film that leaves us puzzled but also curious. Where he stumbles is in evoking the emotional charge he’s clearly aiming for. Meanwhile on Earth is beautiful, but alienating.