Mr Nobody (2009)

You may or may not remember Jaco van Dormael for the irresistible Toto, Le Heros. I remember that film as hiding its dark secrets in lots of inventiveness and imaginative twists. Mr. Nobody offers more of the same in that sense. Sadly, this movie is eaten up by its own imagination: it ends up being a loony thought experiment. The basic concept is that of multiple worlds. The film throws us from one world to the next, from one possibility to the next. More concretely: we see this guy, Nemo, living his life in several parallell worlds, one in which he spent his youth with his mother, one in which he spent these years with his father - and has a cutesy on-off thing with a girl called Anna, who is something his step-sister, or falls in love with Elise.  I am not sure whether the film should be interpret as some sort of cosmic joke, a light-hearted exercise in metaphysics or as a simple yet very complex story about a boy and his mother. The problem with the film is that I never care enough to pose this as a serious question. For all its fascinating and head-spinning turns, Mr Nobody never succeeds in enchanting me and hardly even in entertaining me.