| Mr. Nobody | |
|---|---|
Theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | Jaco Van Dormael |
| Produced by | Philippe Godeau |
| Written by | Jaco Van Dormael |
| Starring | Jared Leto Diane Kruger Sarah Polley Linh Dan Pham |
| Music by | Pierre Van Dormael |
| Cinematography | Christophe Beaucarne |
| Distributed by | Pathé (France) Wild Bunch (France) |
| Release date(s) | 12 September 2009 (Venice) 13 January 2010 (Belgium and France) |
| Running time | 138 minutes |
| Country | France Germany Canada Belgium |
| Language | English |
| Budget | €37 million (US$58 million) |
Mr. Nobody is a 2009 Belgian Science fiction-Drama directed by Jaco Van Dormael and starring Jared Leto, Diane Kruger, Rhys Ifans, Sarah Polley, Linh Dan Pham, Daniel Mays and Natasha Little. Mr. Nobody tells the life story Nemo Nobody (Leto), a 118 year-old man who is the last mortal on Earth after the human race has achieved quasi-immortality. Nemo tells his life story in segments to a young reporter (Mays) and to his psychiatrist (Allan Corduner). Nemo refers to his three main loves (Kruger, Polley and Dan Pham) and to his parents divorce and subsequent hardships endured at three main moments in his life; Nemo at age 9, 16 and 34. The film utilizes non-linear plot progression and the Many-worlds interpretation to tell the story of Nemo's life.
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The main character, who calls himself Nemo Nobody, is a 118-year-old man, the last mortal man on earth. The days leading up to his death become the object of a reality show and are broadcast to the immortal world's population. Nemo himself says that he remembers nothing about his past and a psychiatrist tries to make him recall memories through hypnosis; other memories are told to a journalist. The whole movie is random scraps of memories of Mr. Nobody, which make up conflicting stories of his life. It is unclear which of the memories are real and which are just potential developments of Nemo's life that have not happened.
The film has a tree structure: from the birth of the protagonist, the viewer sees all the possible options for the development of his life, which generally form several "branches".
"Under the concept of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato , the immortal soul of man has absolute knowledge, but before the birth of this knowledge is "forgotten", with the entire process of human knowledge in the course of life is treated as a "remembrance" forgotten soul of the material"
At the beginning of the story it's explained that before birth children remember everything that will happen in their lives, but at the moment of conception the angels of Oblivion put a finger on their lips, making them forget everything. The angels forget about Nemo. A similar idea was expressed by French writer Bernard Werber in his work "The Empire of Angels".[1]
Nemo first has to choose his parents. His second choice happens when they divorce, and he has to decide with whom he will live. This scene takes place at a railway station; his mother leaves on a train, while his father stays. In one case he runs to reach the train and his mother manages to pull him in, in another he stays with his father.
In this storyline, Nemo lives with his mother and her new partner, Harry, and does not get along with him. He behaves in a rebellious way, saying he can predict the future. He meets the daughter of his mother's boyfriend, Anna. Nemo is sitting on the beach, Anna runs to him and asks him to swim with her and her friends. In one case, Nemo answers "They're idiots. I don't go swimming with idiots". He regrets those words all his life, and many years later, he meets Anna at the station with her two children, engange in an awkward conversation, and they part again.
In the second storyline, he tells her he cannot swim, and she stays with him on the beach. They get to know each other and she becomes Nemo's first love. They are happy, but when Harry and Nemo's mother break up, Anna has to go to New York with her father, and they lose touch. Years later, Nemo works as a pool cleaner and hopes to meet Anna again. They meet each other at a station and immediately recognize each other in a crowd of passers-by. After so many years, Anna is not ready to immediately resume the relationship and asks Nemo to wait. She asks him to call her in two days and meet at the lighthouse, but the slip of paper on which she wrote her number gets wet in the rain, and becomes unreadable. Nemo keeps waiting at the lighthouse every day but Anna does not come.
Nemo stays with his father, who becomes an invalid. Nemo takes care of him, becoming withdrawn, uncommunicative, not following the appearance. He works in a shop, and spends his free time at home at the typewriter, writing a fantastic story about a journey to Mars. At a school dance he meets a young Elise, and falls in love with her. A few days later, Nemo goes to Elise's house.
At Elise's house, Nemo sees Elise with her 22-year-old boyfriend, and leaves. Frustrated, he speeds with his motorcycle on a forest road, until he slips on a leaf, falls and is hospitalized in a state of paralysis. He can feel smells and heat, he can see light through closed eyelids, but can not move. There is an allusion to the reunification of the parents, they also come to visit him. Nemo tries to remember the movement of his fingers on the typewriter keyboard, and in the last scene of this storyline, he manages to lift a finger.
In another storyline, Nemo speaks with Elise at her house, but she rejects him saying she loves another man, Stefano. Nemo keeps assuring her of his feelings. Finally Elise gives in, and they marry. In one version of the storyline, Elise dies in an accident on the return from the wedding. Nemo keeps her ashes, having promised her to spread them on Mars. After doing so, aboard the spacecraft on its way, he meets Anna, but the ship crashes due to an encounter with meteorites. In a different version of the storyline, Nemo does not fly to Mars. He works at a television studio, and while returning home he sees the car of his editor being pulled up from a lake. At his funeral, Nemo meets the deceased man's wife, who turns out to be Anna.
Another storyline has Nemo and Elise married with three children. Their marriage is very unhappy because Elise suffers from chronic depression. She has hysteric attacks, and despite Nemo's attempts to save their marriage, in the end Elise leaves the house.
After Elise rejects Nemo, he goes home and tells his father that he'll marry the first girl who will dance with him that night. At the club he meets Jean, they dance, and while taking her home on his motorcycle, Nemo makes what he later describes as "a lot of silly decisions": "One, I will never leave anything to chance again; two, I will marry the girl on my motorcycle; three, I'll be rich; four, we'll have a house, a big house, painted yellow, with a garden, and two children, Paul and Michael; five, I'll have a convertible, a red convertible, and a swimming pool, I'll learn to swim; six, I will not stop until I succeed!"
Despite having succeeded in following his plans, Nemo is unhappy, and his life is boring and unpleasant. Nemo starts relying on the flipping of a coin to make decisions. He pretends to be a person named Daniel Jones, and when he gets to a hotel room he is killed by mistake in the bathroom and buried in the woods.
In another storyline, Nemo is in a strange world dominated by argyle patterns. Following instructions that he finds around the city, he ends up in an abandoned house, where he encounters a video. In the video, 118 year old Nemo explains to him that he doesn't exist. Either his parents did not meet, or his father died in a sled accident as a child, or his parents could not conceive a child, or a prehistoric ancestor of his was killed.
Before his death, Mr. Nobody tells the journalist that they both don't exist: they are in the mind of Nemo as a boy, when he has to make a choice at the railway station. At the railway station, Nemo chooses a third way, and follows a perpendicular road, away from both parents. Mr. Nobody dies, but at that moment the expansion of the universe starts reverting and time reverses.
Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael began seeking to film Mr. Nobody in 2001, an attempt that lasted six years before the director was able to make his English-language feature debut in 2007.[2] Van Dormael's project differed from other Belgian productions in being filmed in English instead of in one of Belgium's main languages. The director explained, "The story came to me in English. It's a story set over very long distances and time frames. One of the strands of the plot is about a kid who must choose between living with his mother in Canada or his father in England. There are also some incredible English-speaking actors I wanted to work with."[3] Mr. Nobody is Van Dormael's first feature film since the Belgian film Le huitième jour (The Eighth Day) in 1996.[2] Van Dormael began preparing production of Mr. Nobody in February 2007 with actress Sarah Polley the first to be cast in the film.[4] Actor Jared Leto was later cast into the primary role of Nemo Nobody. Actress Eva Green was originally reported to be cast into the film, but the casting was not confirmed.[5]
The production budget for Mr. Nobody was €37 million (US$58 million), ranking it the most expensive Belgian film to date. The budget was approved before casting was done, based on the prominence of the director's name and the strength of his script. Half of the budget was provided by the film's French producer Philippe Godeau through his production company Pan-Européenne, and the other half was financed by distributors Wild Bunch and Pathé.[3] Production took place throughout 2007, lasting 120 days and filming in Belgium, Germany, and Canada. Scenes were filmed on location in Montreal, Canada and at Babelsberg Studios in Berlin, Germany.[6] The three lives that Nemo Nobody experiences were separated by color coding and musical cues. Each life's design was also based on the work of British photographer Martin Parr.[7]
While producing the film, Van Dormael took the unique step of publishing his screenplay.[7] The director described the scale of the film, "My producers don't like me saying it, but it's really a big-budget experimental film about the many different lives one person can live, depending on the choices he makes. It's about the infinite possibilities facing any person. There are no good or bad choices in life. It's simply that each choice will create another life for you. What's interesting is to be alive."[6][7]
The different colors used in the film have special, symbolic meanings. Each of the three main storylines has its own unique hue that highlights their originality and unlikeness to each other. Color differentiation can be traced as far back as Nemo's childhood, where three girls sit on a bench. They are his possible future wives: Jean, Elise and Anna; one in yellow, the other in blue, the third in a red dress. In his life with Elise, Nemo experiences the consequences of depression and despair, themes associated with the color blue. Choosing Jean, Nemo seeks material well-being and independence. Yellow - the color of life and wealth - emphasizes this. The true love and passionate relationship between Nemo and Anna is symbolized by the red color of Anna's dress.
It is noteworthy that the unborn Nemo is shown living in a white world. White contains all colors of the visible spectrum, this supports the allegorical message of the film that all things are possible until a choice is made. By the end of his life Nemo is a decrepit old man, and lives in a white surrounding (room, clothes, doctor). This way we can see that the fate of the protagonist leads him back to the origins from where he started, the point at which everything is possible.
The film was edited by Susan Shipton and Matyas Veress. Special effects were produced by Modus FX, Fly Studio and Rodeo FX in Montreal and Digital Graphics in Belgium.
A pigeon is placed in a box containing a button and a window, behind which some food is hidden. When the pigeon presses the button and the window goes up, the dove can take the food. "Like most living creatures, the pigeon quickly associates the pressing of the lever and the reward. But when a timer releases the seed automatically every 20 seconds, every 20 seconds, the pigeon wonders: "What did I do to derserve this?" If it was flapping its wings at the time, it'll continue to flap, convinced that its actions have a decisive influence on what happens. We call this 'pigeon superstition.'".
"What was there before the Big Bang? Well, you see, there was no before because before the Big Bang, time did not exist. Time is a result of the expansion of the Universe itself, but what'll happen when the Universe has finished expanding and the movement is reversed? What'll be the nature of time? If String Theory is correct, the Universe possesses nine spatial dimensions, and one temporal dimension. Now we can imagine that in the beginning, all the dimensions were twisted together and during the Big Bang, three spatial dimensions, the ones that we know as height, width and depth, and one temporal dimension, what we know as time, were deployed. The other six remained miniscule, wound up together. Now, if we live in a Universe of wound dimensions, how do we distinguish between illusion and reality? Time, as we know it, is a dimension we experience only in one direction. But what if one of the additional dimensions wasn't spatial, but temporal?"
"What happens when we fall in love? As a result of certain stimuli, the hypothalamus releases a powerful discharge of endorphins, but why exactly that woman or that man? Is there a release of odorless pheromones that correspond to a complimentary genetic signal? Or is it physical features that we recognize? A mother's eyes, a smell that stimulates a happy memory. Is love part of a plan? A vast war plan between two modes of reproduction. Bacteria and viruses are asexual organisms. With each cell division, each multiplication, they mutate and perfect themselves much more quickly than we do. Against this, we respond with the most fearsome weapon: Sex. Two individuals, by mixing their genes, shuffle the cards and create an individual who resists viruses better the more disimilar he or she is. Now, are we unknowing participants in a war between two modes of reproduction?"
"To what extent are our fears innate? When we hatch goose eggs in an incubator, and then, above the baby birds pass a form simulating a goose in flight, the birds stretch their necks and call out. But if we invert the direction of the silhouette, it conjures the shape of a falcon. The response of the baby birds is immediate. They will crouch and fear, though they've never before seen a falcon. Without any instruction, an innate fear helps them to survive. But in humans, to what ancient dangers might our innate fears correspond?"
"Why does cigarette smoke never go back into the cigarette? Why do molecules spread away from each other? Why does a spilled drop of ink never reform? Because the Universe moves towards a state of dissipation. That is the principle of entropy. The tendency of the Universe to evolve toward a state of increasing disorder. The principle of entropy is related to the arrow of time. A result of the expansion of the Universe. But what will happen when gravitational forces counter-balance the forces of expansion? Or if the energy of the quantum void proves too weak? At that moment, the universe might enter its phase of contraction. The Big Crunch. So what'll become of time? Will it reverse? No one knows the answer."
Mr. Nobody was first presented at the 66th Venice International Film Festival and the Osella for Best Production Designer went to Sylvie Olivé.
In September 2009, Mr. Nobody was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and was received positively.
It won the People's Choice Award 2010 at the 23rd European Film Awards.[8][9]
This movie also appeared at The 45th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2010 in the section Focus on Belgian Film.[10]
On June 25, 2011, it screened for the very first time in the United States at the Los Angeles Film Festival, nearly two years since its original debut.
The Consul General of Belgium, Mr. Geert Criel, held a second United States screening of Mr. Nobody on Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. The 141 minute Directors Cut was shown.
Several tracks are used more than once in the film; hence, the tracklisting below is organized alphabetically by artist.
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