The elusiveness of choice and the ambiguity of reality

Alessia 2022-03-19 09:01:04

As an art form, film is more than just storytelling. Like another art - painting, it may be a story, a mood, or just an aesthetic sharing. It is good that a piece of art has a theme. Therefore, although the beginning of this movie is very similar to "Inception", it does not have to have the only answer and explanation like "Inception", and the only exit.

I have seen director Jacques van Dommel's debut work "Little Hero Toto" 20 years ago. All kinds of fragments are intertwined, and it is like a person's memory. It is found that everyone has become the person they don't want to be, and they have exhausted the nothingness of life. The techniques and routines used in "People with No Surname" are also in the same line, but the theme has become the choice of life at various crossroads. Life is like a train running on constantly changing and intersecting railway tracks. The trajectories of this train are intertwined like fragments. It is the different results of a person looking back on his life choices at the end of his life, or a child's imagination at the beginning of his life. every possibility.

Of these countless choices and possible manifestations, this film mainly uses the most familiar representative - love. To be happy with your true love is to pay for someone who doesn't love you, or choose someone you don't love to perfunctory life. Love is the most elusive thing in human beings, and based on the choices it makes, the possibilities for expansion are endless. There are not only interstellar travel, life and death, but also all kinds of unbearable and dog-blooded stories. It is worth mentioning that this film and "Little Hero Toto" both have the tendency of incestuous love between young brothers and sisters. It is estimated that the director is really good at this.

The cinematography and editing to show it all are impeccable. There are bicycles flying in the Martian atmosphere, and there is also waking up alone in a bizarre studio-like city where everyone is dressed in uniform and has two shadows, and there are helicopters hanging pieces of sea water to build an imaginary world, and of course falling in love. The magic of beautiful people together... Beautiful and imaginative shots, terrifying scenes, and haunting faces. The smooth editing is as chaotic and disordered as memory, but also as smooth and natural as memory. As the male protagonist said when he was dying: life is a playground or nothing. At the same time, it makes people immersed in it, and at the same time question the meaning of the so-called "truth".






Can we foresee the future? Obviously not. Then every choice we make, whether it's based on careful thought, a single thought, or a coin toss, is not necessarily the real cause of the consequences we encounter. Yet the choice still entangles us, as the rippling butterfly effect spreads so quickly that we don’t know what will lead to it. If time could be reversed and everything could be traced back to its source, we would not have to make these choices.

You should see that although this is a $47 million sci-fi film, the superstring theory universe collapses, pigeons, superstitions, and butterfly effects are all just for the unpredictability of choice and the ambiguity of "real". It's just a coat to put on the theme.

You will be surprised to find that to express this theme, only the film is the most perfect form. Although the film doesn't "tell the story well".

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Extended Reading
  • Yasmin 2022-03-16 09:01:03

    The exchange value of this 157 minutes. A romantic literary film wrapped in a sci-fi coat, poignant and moving, and hearty. It is reminiscent of "Cloud Atlas", "Song of Opportunity", "Arctic Circle Lovers", etc. It happens that these are also movies that I like very much, which is too rare.

  • Octavia 2022-01-25 08:07:07

    Nemo finally finds the unchanging truth in the tangle of time and variables. No matter how you think about it, you can only get pigeons that keep flapping their wings in pigeon superstition. We are pigeons that keep flapping their wings. We have been trying and persevering, pursuing and exploring, humble and small, flapping our wings.

Mr. Nobody quotes

  • Nemo Nobody aged 118: I've got nothing to say to you. I'm Mr. Nobody, a man who doesn't exist.

    Young journalist: Do you remember what the world was like before telemerization? Quasi-immortality? What was it like when humans were mortals?

    Nemo Nobody aged 118: There were cars that polluted. We smoked cigarettes. We ate meat. We did everything we can't do in this dump and it was wonderful! Most of the time nothing happened... like a French movie.

    Young journalist: And, um, sexually? Before sex became obsolete.

    Nemo Nobody aged 118: Ha, ha! We screwed! Everybody was always screwing. We fell in love... we fell in love.

  • Nemo Nobody adult: What was there before the big bang? Well, you see, there was no before because before the big bang, time did not exist. Time is a result of the expansion of the universe itself. But what will happen when the universe has finished expanding?