Mr. Nobody

Colour, 35 mm
Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, 2009, 155 min
Section: Focus on Belgian Film

Synopsis

The premise of this film, which is as extravagant as it is ambitious, is actually quite simple. A married couple decide to get divorced and this means that their son, the young Nemo Nobody, has a heart-rending choice to make: to stay with his father or to move to the other side of the world with his mother. As long as he doesn’t make up his mind anything is possible. The film presents a number of potential consequences – side-by-side or interlinked. For example, what if Nemo were to marry that little girl in the red dress? His life would turn out differently than if he chose the girl in yellow. And what about the little girl dressed in blue? Thus, the story is told at a variety of locations and takes place in the past, the present and the distant future, but not necessarily in chronological order. It sounds more complicated than it really is since, as writer-director Jaco Van Dormael puts it: "Each character appears in someone else’s dreams and, in turn, dreams of another life.”

About the director

Jaco Van Dormael (b. 1957, Ixelles, Belgium) made several notable shorts (such as L’imitateur and E pericoloso sporgersi) before embarking on his first feature, Toto the Hero, which was an immediate hit and scooped the Caméra d’Or for best debut at Cannes in 1991. Five years later he was among the prizes again at Cannes with The Eighth Day (Le huitième jour, 1996), when his two leading actors, Daniel Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne, were jointly awarded the prize for Best Actor. Mr. Nobody, shot in 2009, is his third feature film. It is also his first English language film and his most ambitious production to date. Jaco van Dormael: "As far as I’m concerned, the measure of a film’s success is not the number of people who go to see it in the cinema, but the length of time it stays in the memory.”