THE “WORLD” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Imagine a face like a curtain, behind which the character could hide a whole world, or even invite the viewer to confide his secrets. Jérémy Clapin reveals this magic trick to us from the prodigious opening of his second feature film, Meanwhile on Earth. Four minutes that set the scene for a breathtaking story of mourning, mixing live action and animation.
The film begins with a voiceover discussion, against the backdrop of a space shuttle. Elsa, in her twenties, talks with her beloved brother, Franck, an astronaut, who has just left on a mission and already misses her. Then the ship disappears and lets us discover the young woman (Megan Northam), whose blond hair lights up the night. She is alone, a spray paint in hand, and begins to tag the letter F, like Franck, on the statue erected in tribute to her brother, in his spacesuit. Because he has been reported missing. Seeing her brother thus melted into bronze breaks her heart… It is at this moment that a choral song pierces the silence and capsizes the decor.
Here we are in the cartoon, on a desert planet, which two inseparable astronauts travel. The brother and sister, we assume, seem to float, free in their movements, then the camera freezes on Elsa as a graphic heroine: a white, vertical line separates her face in two, which suddenly disappears like two panels of curtain that move apart. And brings us back to reality. Without transition, the viewer discovers the corridor of a nursing home with its elderly residents, where Elsa works. After such a performance, we are ready to follow the heroine into the labyrinths of science fiction or her inner dreams…
Faustian Pact
In real life, Elsa accompanies people at the end of their lives, in an establishment run by her mother. She washes them, helps them eat, all the while drawing them in her notebook. It is not the job she dreamed of, but she does it temporarily, perhaps waiting one day to return to comics. Faced with his daughter’s dismay, the father (Sam Louwyck) is a magnificent block of wounded tenderness. But the days follow one another and are all the same for Elsa: deadly. Back and forth by car from home to work, then, in the evening, daydreams near the relay antenna on the hill, where she observes the stars.
One night, she hears someone calling her. It’s her brother Franck, she’s sure of it, he seems alive, held somewhere, then the signal gets garbled. Another voice (that of Dimitri Doré) asks her to connect – with a sort of sticky ball, emerging from a plant, that Elsa nestles in her ear – and to follow the instructions.
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