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 drunken Philippe asks the 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.
This review taken from Delta Sierra Arts
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