Dir. Robert Lepage

The Far Side of the Moon, Robert Lepage’s adaptation of his own play, is a beautiful, quirky meditation on a pair of brothers in Quebec coping with the death of their mother from kidney disease. Reflecting the title, Lepage plays both lead roles: Phillippe, a grad student of the philosophy of science, and his brother Andre, a glib weatherman. The two form opposing faces of the same family, Phillippe the more distant, uglier one - the far side of the moon - and Andre the less cerebral pretty boy, and LePage distinguishes them successfully.

Phillippe’s oft-rejected thesis puts forward the theory that the drive for space exploration was a product of narcissism, and indeed the film itself links the self-absorption of Phillippe with his interest in space, which is about as far as one can look outwards. Yet for all his self-absorption and his claims of intellectual superiority to his brother, Phillippe is hardly any good at introspection, and one of the revelations near the film’s end centres around something he should have realised about his mother.

As an aging grad student who works in a call centre, Phillippe carries a fair bit of (humorous) bitterness about life’s rewards being somewhat unequal to his intellect, a bitterness that’s exacerbated by his brother’s success and infuses his speech. Thus, he says of Andre, “I don’t care if he’s gay, but like most gays I know he’s carefree, rich and lucky”. When, in the course of his work, Phillippe accidentally ends up calling the house of his ex-girlfriend, the conversation starts off gentle, even reconciliatory, until he makes an unthinkingly snide-sounding remark on the wealth of her husband.

Yet The Far Side of the Moon is hardly a small personal drama, shifting as it does from the brothers’ lives and the mundane to the deeper questions of the cosmos: is there life out there? How do we make a mark in the world? The visual style of the film matches this seamless shifting between the banal and the cosmic: Lepage doesn’t so much cut between scenes as lets them flow into one another in one continual loop of past and present, such that all the events of the brothers’ world form part of the same space-time continuum, giving equal import to the problems of the personal and the infinite.

LePage balances the weight of existential questions and personal tragedy with the lightness of the film’s dry humour: numerous visual jokes pepper the film, and its dry, laconic tone reminded me occasionally of The Man Without a Past (is it something about the humour that northern climes engender?). Its comedic highlight is the video that Phillippe makes for a SETI contest: filming beds for his video message to extraterrestial civilisations, he notes that “You don’t have to be single to sleep on a single… and twins rarely sleep on twins”.

At one point, the drunk Philippe asks a bartender, how does a cosmonaut reconcile the glories of seeing space with the banality of day-to-day chores? As The Far Side of the Moon shows, it is Phillippe’s coming to terms with both the grand question of our place in the universe and the banal but important facts of day-to-day life that let him achieve escape velocity and weightlessness.

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