Jared Leto, Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger and Linh-Dan Pham – one man recalls three love stories and inhabits three possible worlds in this spectacular fantasy from the fertile mind of Jaco Van Dormael.
It has been thirteen years since Van Dormael, one of the bright talents of cinema, has made a film. He burst onto the scene in the early nineties, and after two spectacular successes withdrew from filmmaking. Mr. Nobody is a welcome return. The sabbatical appears to have liberated Van Dormael's imagination, for this work is a daring and ambitious creation, full of risks and afraid of nothing. Mr. Nobody takes a dazzling leap into the mind of its central character, jumbling together science-fiction, flashbacks and naturalist filmmaking in an amazing kaleidoscopic portrait of the life of its protagonist, a man named Nemo.
Nemo (Leto) is the oldest living mortal in a late twenty-first-century setting where death has been conquered thanks to advances in stem-cell technology. On his deathbed, this last remnant of a world soon to disappear, the world of mortality, looks back on his life – or rather, the three lives he might have led with three different women, on perhaps more than one planet. Nemo's reveries and trips down memory lane are full of small delights and joys, as well as a bemusing bewilderment as to what all of it has meant. He remembers a normal life as a husband and father, and summons up sundry incidents from his childhood and youth, assembling these fragments into a huge visual collage of reminiscences. In various scenarios, he is settled into a comfortable but cold marriage, desperately lovelorn or pitched partway in between. In each case, his actions are governed by an existential mantra: “As long as you don't choose, everything becomes possible.”
Van Dormael shuffles these alternate realities with remarkable dexterity, bringing each one into focus as a genuine possibility for his tortured hero as Nemo plunges back into the past from a brightly lit but disturbing future. Ambitious, technically stunning and completely original, Mr. Nobody is a marvel.
Piers Handling
Jaco Van Dormael was born in Ixelles, Belgium. He worked as a circus clown and directed children's theatrical shows before studying cinematography at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière in Paris and directing at L'Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion (INSAS) in Brussels. His first feature,
Toto le héros, won the Prix de la Jeunesse and the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991. He went on to make the features
Le Huitième jour (96) and
Mr. Nobody (09).