Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur terre) is in the Official Selection at the Glasgow Film Festival, 5 Mar 2025
Writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur terre) is a live-action film, but is it regularly punctuated with animated sequences – not unlike those in Clapin’s previous, all-animated feature I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps, 2019). These depict a male astronaut and an antennaed female alien having intergalactic adventures together. They not only show us the close relationship of Elsa (Megan Northam, superb) to her older brother Franck (Yoan Germain Le mat), a genuine cosmonaut who has become “lost on a space mission” and is presumed dead, but they also reveal things about Elsa herself. For Elsa is an art student who habitually makes sketches for cartoons (brought to life by this animation), and who has a vivid imagination for science-fiction and horror scenarios (as a child she drew a comic book in which she took revenge when her parents were murdered by monstrous fishmen). She also sees herself as an otherworldly creature, so alienated as to be literally an alien.
Elsa now works with dementia patients in the nursing home run by her mother Annick (Catherine Salée), who, along with stoner father Daniel (Sam Louwyck) and little brother Vincent (Roman Williams), are all coping in their own ways with the disappearance of Franck from their lives – but Elsa herself, whose bond with her brother was intense, cannot bring herself to sever her connection to him and let go. So when, while out at night, she hears Franck’s voice, it is if all her dreams were coming true – except that then another voice (Dimitri Doré), heard via an organic device (like a Babel fish) which Elsa places in her ear, starts giving her instructions as to what actions she must take if she wishes to see her brother’s return to Earth. What follows is a moral drama as Elsa must weigh up some thorny conundrums regarding what she is willing to do and how far she is willing to go in return for her brother’s life – while at the same time Elsa’s psychological journey is filtered through filmic tropes like the Cronenbergian body horror of her ear piece, body snatching and even rape revenge (with a chainsaw!).
These blatant genre elements raise questions about how much of what we are seeing is real, and how much represents the ‘stable decline’ of Elsa’s psyche. For the voices in her head, the interactions with aliens, and the bizarre woodland missions (with invisible effects) all suggest that we are witnessing a young, impressionable woman’s mental disintegration as she struggles with overwhelming grief – and so the alien motif, previously used as an allegorical cover story for sexual abuse in Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004), Brad Abrahams’ documentary Love And Saucers (2017) and Carl Joseph E. Papa’s The Missing (Iti mapukpukaw, 2023), here becomes a vehicle for Elsa’s unresolved sorrow, and the gulf between the living and the dead which perhaps even the most vivid imaginations cannot fully transcend.
As a film that puts us inside an individual’s damaged headspace, Meanwhile on Earth comes with a certain ambiguity. Does Elsa really entice several people for alien abduction? or commit single, or indeed serial murder? or is she just play-acting this whole scenario in her mind, as in one of her fanciful comics? Do we leave her in a state of recovery, or in a displaced, off-planet dream, or dying at her own hand? None of these questions is straightforwardly answerable – but her addled, conflicting feelings remain true, as she negotiates her place in a vast universe where her own sense of unfathomable loss may be elevating her to (the) heaven(s) or echoing against a void. This is a strange yet sensitive portrait of someone processing grief through fantasy, and – maybe just maybe – authoring art of their own, as profound and moving as Clapin’s.
strap: Jérémy Clapin’s sci-fi psychodrama depicts a young artist’s struggles with grief as alien(ating) adventure
© Anton Bitel
