alternative lives
Jaco Van
Dormael (writer and director) Mr. Nobody
/ 2009, USA 2011
Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto) cannot remember
his own past, and therefore does not exist. Perhaps because the angels forgot
to give him the gift of forgetfulness upon his birth, the story told us through
hypnotism by Nemo's doctor and an interview with a young journalist determined
to discover the "history" of the last mortal man on earth—all other
living people having achieved "quasi-immortality"—is not a single,
linear story, but a statement of some of the possibilities for this man's life,
each of them producing a different fate for our "hero." Moving
through several different genres—science fiction, love stories, psychological
tales, and lectures—Belgian director Van Dormael explores, sometimes comically
and other times more tragically, the 9 year old boy's question: "Why am I
me and not somebody else?"
To demonstrate this the director takes his character through several
scenarios, each told in disjunctive
fragments, creating a tale that the audience must connect, piece by piece, in
order to make meaning. But after having "come through," so to speak,
no viewer will be able to find a coherent answer to whom Nemo Nobody is;
indeed, as the 118-year-old Nemo tells his younger self on a video, perhaps he
doesn't exist: his parents never met, or his father was killed in a sled
accident as a child, or his parents couldn't conceive a child, or a prehistoric
ancestor of his was killed.
The lives of Nemo, accordingly, are aspects of the imagination, each
variant no worse or better than the others, but all very different. Perhaps at the
core is the fact that Nemo was never able to make a decision; as he puts it at
age 9: "You have to make the right choice. As long as you don't choose,
everything remains possible." But, of course, if you make no choices, you
have no life in which to create a human being.
In another version, they meet, again in a train station, but Anna is not
ready to make up her mind about resuming their relationship, and gives him a
phone number, telling Nemo to meet her two days later at the river. Rain
suddenly pours from the sky, erasing the number, and, although Nemo visits the
river spot near a lighthouse day after day, Anna never shows.
In another
version of the central story, Nemo is unable to catch the train and stays with
his father, washing and caring for him as he grows old. In this version Nemo
falls in love with another young school girl, Elise, who is in love with
Stephano, and older boy. In one telling of this tale, Nemo observes her kissing her
lover goodbye and speeds away on his motorcycle, which slips on a leaf,
paralyzing the young driver. In a second telling, when Elise tells him she is
in love with Stefano, he continues to pursue her, she finally giving in. But on
their return from the wedding, she is killed in a car
accident. Having promised her he will spread her ashes on Mars, Nemo writes a
science-fiction tale about the planet. In another variant, he actually goes to
Mars, encountering another version of Anna just as the spacecraft is hit
meteoroids and crashes. One more version tells us that Nemo works for a
television studio, lecturing on the planets and other scientific subjects, one
day discovering that his editor has died when his car crashes into a lake. At
the funeral he meets the editor's wife, Anna.
In one more reading of his relationship with Elise, they have three
children and live in a large suburban house. However, Elise suffers chronic
depression and hysteric attacks, ultimately leaving their home.
Returning to the larger story of his relationship with his father, Nemo
declares that he will marry the first girl who dances with him that night. In
this case, his lover is Jean (Linh Dan Pham) with whom he develops a life as he
has outlined from the start:
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 how to swim; six, I will not stop until I succeed!
Succeed he does, living this luxurious
version. But this time round, it is he who is chronically depressed, unfulfilled
with everything and is unresponsive to his wife's loving pleas. Somewhat like
the evil Anton Churgih of the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, Nemo begins to make decisions by flipping a
coin, pretending to be a man called Daniel Jones, discovering himself in a
wealthy hotel where two men enter his bathroom and shoot him, mistaking him for
the other.
The young journalist, interviewing the old Nemo, is understandably
confused:
Everything you say is
contradictory. You can't have been in once place and
and another at the same time.
Of all those lives, which one is the right one?
Obviously, there is no right one. And as
quantum physics tells us, one can be at least in two places at the same time.
But Van Dormael has so clearly made that evident by this time that we have long
ago lost some interest in this fascinating mulligan stew. If we have been
entertained by the perplexing mish-mash of stories early on, near the end of
the film, we begin to see it as an overstated and delineated series of
possibilities or alternative realities. The director has even color-coded
Nemo's encounters with these various "loves," red for his deepest
love,
Anna; blue for his troubled life with Elise; and
yellow for his golden life in the sun with Jean. Combined with the several
lecture-driven themes of the film, we begin to feel ponderously lectured at, almost in the way Terence Malick has
time and again hit his audience over the head in The Tree of Life. Indeed one of Van Dormael's patterns, we
perceive, is like a tree, the different branches representing alternate
possibilities for living. Accordingly, what first appeared as fascinating variances,
represented by often brilliant images, begin to dizzy us by film's end.
The final imaginative placement of Anna in the circle Nemo has drawn
near the lighthouse explodes the tale, as Nemo—the man who never was—walks a
path apart from both father and mother, now dying, time reversing as smoke
returns to a cigarette, shattered glass is magically repaired, and ink runs
back into the pen, the universe contracting, erasing even the director's tale.
His Penelope-like depiction of his story has come unwoven. This viewer, at least, was left with a feeling
of great emptiness in all these possibilities rather than satiated by the
promised feast.
Los
Angeles, March 3, 2012
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