Jaco Van Dormael
Directed and written by Jaco Van Dormael, Mr. Nobody is a brilliant film that portrays the timeless theme of life’s choices and possibilities in a refreshing and dazzling manner. Despite the complex and unconventional narrative structure of the plot, Dormael demonstrates his extraordinary skills of storytelling through presenting to the audience a magnificent film with a form more complicated than Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and a theme broader than Peter Howitt’s primary focus on love in Sliding Doors. This essay will analyze how the the seven key conventions defined by Bordwell (2002) are defied by or applied on the film’s multi-draft narrative.
The film begins with a montage showing four deaths of Nemo at the age of 34---him lying in …show more content…
In this sense, it can be said that the characters of Mr Nobody are somewhat goal-oriented. “Everything you say is contradictory. You can 't have been in one place and another at the same time. Of all those lives, which one is the right one?” asks the interviewer. This line shows that the film is self-reflective as it is clearly aware of the nature of its unconventional narrative. The forking paths of Nemo consist of “recurrent characters and background conditions across the different lines of action” (Wedel, 2009) which is Bordwell’s third convention. For instance, whichever path Nemo takes, he always runs into Anna, the woman who loves him as much as he does her. Not only does it show the intersection of the multiplicity, it also highlights the love theme of the film---one cannot possibly be happy with someone if the affection is not mutual. That is why Nemo is not happy with either Elise or …show more content…
Nemo eventually dies at the time he has predicted he would, but as soon as he does, time rewinds quickly all the way to his childhood, echoing with Nemo’s earlier statement to his younger self, “For me, time is inverted. I start at the end of the story and go toward the beginning” and confirming that he has truly always known everything about the past as well as the future. The film ends, leaving its audiences puzzled and
The film begins with a montage showing four deaths of Nemo at the age of 34---him lying in …show more content…
In this sense, it can be said that the characters of Mr Nobody are somewhat goal-oriented. “Everything you say is contradictory. You can 't have been in one place and another at the same time. Of all those lives, which one is the right one?” asks the interviewer. This line shows that the film is self-reflective as it is clearly aware of the nature of its unconventional narrative. The forking paths of Nemo consist of “recurrent characters and background conditions across the different lines of action” (Wedel, 2009) which is Bordwell’s third convention. For instance, whichever path Nemo takes, he always runs into Anna, the woman who loves him as much as he does her. Not only does it show the intersection of the multiplicity, it also highlights the love theme of the film---one cannot possibly be happy with someone if the affection is not mutual. That is why Nemo is not happy with either Elise or …show more content…
Nemo eventually dies at the time he has predicted he would, but as soon as he does, time rewinds quickly all the way to his childhood, echoing with Nemo’s earlier statement to his younger self, “For me, time is inverted. I start at the end of the story and go toward the beginning” and confirming that he has truly always known everything about the past as well as the future. The film ends, leaving its audiences puzzled and