Mr. Nobody

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title Mr. Nobody
Country of production France
Belgium
Canada
Germany
original language English
Publishing year 2010
length 138 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Jaco Van Dormael
script Jaco Van Dormael
production Philippe Godeau
Bert Hamelinck, Christian Larouche, Daniel Marquet, Frank Van Passel
music Pierre Van Dormael
camera Christophe Beaucarne
occupation

Mr. Nobody is a romantic fantasy - drama from director and screenwriter Jaco Van Dormael from the year of 2009.

action

The film Mr. Nobody deals with the difficulties and implications of making decisions. The story tells of a nine-year-old boy, Nemo Nobody, who has to choose at a train station whether he wants to go with his mother or stay with his father after his parents divorce.

While thinking about it, Nemo forms various characters, including himself, who are always dismantled and rebuilt in the representation before a scene change, between the different scenarios. In making the best decision, the child relies on their omniscience of the things they have at their disposal, as they have been overlooked by the "angels of oblivion" who, according to the story, take their knowledge away from all children before they are born. This factor enables the boy to have very pronounced ideas about his possible futures, all of which he looks at like in a cinema and which in a certain way he actually lives through. This can be seen because when changing scenarios - which is often done to illustrate indecision - he himself gets mixed up.

In the course of the decision making process there are three basic ideas between which the main character alternates. During this, new decisions sometimes bring results that Nemo does not like, so he rewinds and tries other versions, but it remains at the origins. The three options differ in particular in which of the three girls Anna, Elise or Jeanne, whom he knows from his hometown, he will decide later. Anna gets to know Nemo better when he first follows his mother; He meets Elise again while he is taking care of his sick father, and his relationship with Jeanne is the result of an escalation when the path with Elise initially threatens to fail. The latter way shows how the different trains of thought influence each other, because he makes the decision to put up with Elise's behavior towards him on such a large scale, in many respects because of his mother. While he experienced a lot of breakups with Anna, but found himself in a very happy position towards the end of this scenario, he had much more profound problems in the scenarios with the other two women. Elise's nascent depression, for example, develops out of the compulsion with which Nemo pushed her into the relationship even though she was in love with another.

The narrative of the film begins at the end of one of the three paths, when Nemo gives an interview to a sensation-hungry journalist in a future in which biological immortality has been achieved. Nemo himself is the last mortal person here, 118 years old and close to death. Nemo not only tells the journalist about his many possible lives, but also tries to explain to his interlocutor that neither of them exist, but that they are only shapes of the ideas of his own nine-year-old self; however, the journalist understands little.

In one of the remembered future variants of the boy from the path with Elise, an aging Nemo met an aging Anna, who here was a scientist who studied the essence of space and time. Elise was long dead, and Nemo scattered her ashes on Mars as he had promised her when he was 15. Anna told Nemo at the time that something special was going to happen on February 12, 2092, 5:50 a.m. At that point the universe will stop expanding. The space will start again contract and the time will perhaps begin to run backwards. Nemo hopes for a second chance in the future variant with the interview. A few seconds before the appointment, the dying person loses consciousness. But the clock actually starts to run backwards and Nemo wakes up again. The film ends with a scene of young people chatting on a boat dock in summer.

Philosophical Theories

While making the decision, Nemo encounters some phenomena that have an impact on the success of his ideas, such as the chaos theory or the butterfly effect . These are processed in the film in a scenario in which he moderates philosophical theories as an actor in the course of a documentary film.

production

Production overview

Director Jaco Van Dormael with Sarah Polley , Jared Leto , Linh Dan Pham and Diane Kruger

Scriptwriter and director Jaco Van Dormael's first ideas in 2001 actually referred to an 11-minute short film that he had completed in the 1980s. When he was finished with the first drafts, he had deviated a lot from the subject of the film at the time and apart from the fact that it bothered him, some films that were released at that time, e.g. Lola runs , with similar motifs, spoke against a production of the film . Pre-production began in February 2007 with the casting of actress Sarah Polley , followed by the casting of other leading roles. The shooting began on 4 June 2007 and lasted 25 weeks.

The budget of the film was 47 million US dollars .

Locations

Belgium
Canada
Germany
New York (USA)

Reviews

"[...] Like a" Benjamin Button "for intellectuals, the film treats very complex concepts, such as the infinite number of possibilities that human life offers, in an entertaining way. You follow the hero Nemo Nobody (age 0 to 118) through different lives that he would have led based on different decisions. This English-language co-production with a large budget shows that Europeans can keep up in the science fiction field, in which (technically) complex productions rule. [...] "

- The Hollywood Reporter

"[...] In" Mr. Nobody "there is no emotional wing flap that would trigger a storm of passion. Approaches to this - for example in the wonderfully carefree teenage love story - fizzle out very quickly in a picture labyrinth without Ariadne's thread, which only leads to soulless virtuosity. [...] "

- Süddeutsche.de

"The movie" Mr. Nobody "is about the last mortal person. And the separation of his parents. And three different loves. And string theory. And a white unicorn. And unfortunately also about the question of whether a film can consist of too many good ideas. […] For seven years, says Van Dormael, he wrote the script, every day from ten in the morning to half past three in the afternoon. In another possible life, he might have made two or three or more films out of the material in those seven years. That would have been good because it was less strenuous. And because he could have told more thoughts and stories. On the other hand, it would have been a shame. Because Van Dormael's work is an imposition, but a clever and fascinating imposition. When you step back into the daylight from the cinema, you feel like American tourists must feel after seeing all of Europe in two and a half days: overwhelmed and a little confused. "

- SPIEGEL online

Trivia

  • As a backdrop for the studio of the series "The Last Mortals", which is broadcast from "New New York Hospital", served u. a. the architecture of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus , which was supplemented by high-rise buildings through computer animation.

Web links

Commons : Mr. Nobody  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Mr. Nobody . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , May 2010 (PDF; test number: 122 971 K).
  2. ↑ Jaco van Dormael (Mr. Nobody) Interview. (Video) Tribute, accessed February 14, 2011 .
  3. ↑ Alison James: Van Dormael prepares 'Nobody'. (No longer available online.) Variety , February 12, 2007, formerly the original ; accessed on February 14, 2011 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.variety.com  
  4. ↑ Deborah Young: Mr. Nobody - Film Review. The Hollywood Reporter , September 25, 2009, accessed February 14, 2011 .
  5. ↑ Rainer Gansera: Make me the butterfly. Süddeutsche.de , July 8, 2010, accessed October 3, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Maren Keller: Science fiction melodrama: The possibilities of a life. SPIEGEL online , July 8, 2010, accessed April 8, 2016 .