With “Nowhere Special”, Uberto Pasolini manages a completely unsentimental film about death.
A young man and boy are sitting on a bench with their hands folded. Both are wearing baseball caps, the child looks up at the man who is looking into the distance. Maybe he just copied his hand-folding. Above them a washed-out, cloudy sky and the film title: “Nowhere Special”. What kind of film is this inviting yet enigmatic poster trying to promote? A father-son story with the wisdom of Forrest Gump?
Not really. Uberto Pasolini’s little film brushed all Hollywood formulas aside. And even if the actor on the poster, James Norton, was traded as the next “007” for a long time: Nothing in his restrained play serves the keyboard of emotionalization. Based on a little newspaper report, the director wanted to make a film of the utmost simplicity, something like the Japanese Ozu or the Dardenne brothers. He succeeded. The little message is moving enough.
According to the Daily Mail, a single father suffering from cancer spent his last few months looking for adoptive parents with the child. It’s hard to imagine what that must mean, but that’s exactly what Pasolini paints before us. In simple scenes that sometimes seem almost documentary, as precisely as they depict the milieu and mentality of the potential adoptive parents in Belfast. And on the other hand, when they describe the often wordless togetherness between the loving father and his son, they develop a magical balance. Ozu, the Dardenne brothers or Robert Bresson or Abbas Kiarostami: all these master directors would have been proud of it.
Pasolini seems to have extracted these crucial months so naturally from the lives of the two of them that any further packaging, any decoration, forbids itself. There isn’t the doctor’s office scene where the man is told his terrible diagnosis; neither is death on the screen. It’s a film about death anyway, and the question of how to talk about it is central to the story. So why still show death when that is often enough a gateway for the fake in the cinema?
With the help of dinosaurs?
The authority that takes care of the adoption gives the window cleaner a children’s book. “This is how dinosaurs die” they say, but he holds it back for a long time. What better way to talk to a child about death? But how do you explain your approach to a four-year-old? He is advised to collect mementos for his child in a small box. “Where did you learn that?” He snaps: “Just starting your studies?”
At this point, at the latest, Pasolini reaches a point that exposes most death dramas as cheap. No, the greatest taboo in our society cannot be treated with simple formulas. Even if the man will eventually resort to these aids: What one cannot talk about, to remain silent about it seems to this unskilled worker at first sight as a better choice.
The decision about the potential adoptive parents seems almost easier to him: at first they all seem unsuitable to him. Especially the idea that the upper class is best cared for a child quickly turns out to be a fallacy. He has long since overused the authority’s patience and resources, apart from one understanding employee. Perhaps a Hollywood director would have taken the opportunity to take a romantic turn here, but not Pasolini.
Cinema has dealt with dying time and again throughout its history, including some of its greatest classics. “Nowhere Special” has what it takes and can also be seen as an alternative. Its simple appearance is the product of patience, luck and perfection. In addition to a beguilingly serious child actor, Daniel Lamont, and James Norton’s masterpiece in the lead role, this is also thanks to the image designer Marius Panduru, one of the fathers of the Romanian film wonder.
The 64-year-old filmmaker Pasolini did nothing less than a miracle with his third directorial work. A true film about death is hard enough to find. Especially a completely unsentimental one about love: even if no gesture or tone is intended, it does not stop touching us.
Nowhere Special. GB/I/RU 2020. Regie: Uberto Pasolini. 96 Min.
