Mr. Nobody (2010)
Directed by Jaco Van Dormael

Film Review

Can it really be fourteen years since the Belgian filmmaker Jaco van Dormael hoisted on us his last film, the sublime lyrical oddity that was Le Huitième jour (1996)?  Now, he is back, with his weirdest film yet.  Mr Nobody is Van Dormael's most ambitious film so far.  It cost 33 million euros to make (thereby earning itself the distinction of the most expensive Belgian film ever) and took six months to shoot, in various locations across Belgium, Germany and Canada.  It is also the director's first English language film and features an impressive international cast that is headed by Jared Leto (excellent in various different guises, including a decrepit centenarian), and includes Diane Kruger, Sarah Polley and Linh-Dan Pham.

Stylistically and thematically, the film has much in common with Van Dormael's remarkable debut feature, Toto le héros (1991), but it offers much more of a challenge and is cinematographically far more diverse and interesting.  Mr Nobody is not a film for everybody, evidenced by the very mixed reviews it has so far garnered.  Overblown, confused and overloaded with abstruse scientific and philosophical ideas, it is a film that risks being written off as a self-indulgent, self-conscious monstrosity.  Yet, for anyone with a taste for the truly bizarre and an interest in matters metaphysical, it offers a seductively beguiling cinema experience - a crazy, head-spinning excursion into eerily unfamiliar territory.  It is one of those odd, indefinable films that you have to watch at least three times to appreciate how brilliant it is, although having done so you will probably end up spending the rest of your life in therapy (either that or becoming a physics teacher).

Critics of Mr Nobody have been quick to write it off as a messy rehash of other films that have explored the idea of alternative realities, most notably Alain Resnais's Smoking / No Smoking (1993), Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998) and Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors (1998).  But, as the director himself has pointed out, Mr Nobody is not a film about the two trajectories that result from a single choice; it is about the mind-boggling multiplicity of outcomes that stem from one decision.  We like to think that whenever we make a decision we have two well-defined paths ahead of us.  In fact, what we are actually doing is choosing between two mazes, without any real idea where either will lead us.  When the little boy who is at the heart of the film becomes torn between staying with his father or following his mother his future instantly bifurcates (to borrow a term from chaos theory), so that he has two completely different lives in front of him.  In each of these lives, he faces further decisions, the most dramatic being his choice of life partner.  As the boy looks forward into his increasingly labyrinthine future, the old man he will become looks back and struggles to make sense of the multiple lives he has lived or imagines he has lived.  It is an insanely ambitious project but Van Dormael somehow just manages to pull it off, through a combination of daring visual artistry, imaginative storytelling and compelling performances.  If you cannot follow the plot, you can at least marvel at the special effects, which are superb.

Mr Nobody will doubtless appeal far more to science junkies than the average art house cinemagoer, as it manages to weave into its fractured narrative many profound scientific and philosophical ideas, ranging from chaos theory (the notion that a small event can have enormous unforeseen consequences) to the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which conveniently attaches a one-way arrow to the thing we call time).  How many blockbusters these days have the time to break off in mid-flow and deliver a mini-lecture on the Big Bang, the multiverse, quantum indeterminacy and entropy?  Most interesting is the way in which the film explores the fuzzy relationship between imagination and reality, the extent to which we can control and manipulate reality by what we think (or think we think).

Van Dormael's interest in determinism (evident in his first two films) is central to Mr Nobody, which is in essence a statement of our ability (or inability) to choose our own reality.  Throughout much of the film, the central protagonist (named Nemo, the Latin word for nobody) appears to be at the mercy of events and has no control over his life.  It is only at the end, in the surprising denouement, that the hero is able to assert his free will, rejecting the two options offered to him and choosing a third that leads to genuine happiness.  But even this may be an illusion, a flight of fancy, since in a previous surreal digression Nemo, as an old man, asserts that nobody, himself included, really exists.  The more you think about the mysteries and paradoxes of existence, the easier it is to believe that everything is just the figment of someone's deranged imagination.  Van Dormael's latest unhinged film almost makes this a concrete certainty.

Film Synopsis

In 2093, Nemo is 118, the last surviving mortal in a world in which humanity has attained quasi-immortality.  As everyone on the planet awaits his death in morbid anticipation, a scientist and a journalist try to get him to remember his past.  Nemo has difficulty collating his memories and offers various contradictory accounts of his life, each lived with a different woman.  The confusion stems from the day when, as a nine-year-old boy, he had to choose between his two parents when they separated at a railway station...