Sci-fi as self-help, Federico Arioni’s second feature film, Nobody Is Crazy (Nadie Está Loco), does away with most of the trappings, scratch that, all of the trappings of the sci-fi movie and focuses instead on the mental well-being of Rafael, an Argentinian teenager with OCD.
It’s a a strange, confident movie made for no money, starring whole swathes of Arioni’s family, including his mother, who plays Rafael’s mother, and Arioni himself, who turns up in black mask as a time-travelling “chrononaut”, or so he says. Or maybe he’s Rafael’s dad, arriving from the past, or Rafael himself, from some years in the future.
The film is the story of the relationship between these two. Lonely, neurodivergent Rafael and self-confident, intelligent Nadie (it translates as Nobody), who might be a time-traveller or he might be an escaped patient from a psychiatric hospital, Rafael can’t be sure but it does help explain the punning title.
With Rafael providing hefty amounts of voiceover – the tortured ramblings of the unhappy mind – once introductions have been made and lines of communication established, the two talk extensively. About the possibility of time paradoxes and whether the Novikov Principle is valid. Whether killing Mao Zedong would have changed anything in the world. Of free will and determinism.
And about girls, or one girl in particular, Daria (Lara Ammi Wheeler), a teenager on blades who bumps into Rafael while he and Nadie are walking and talking (they do a lot of walking and talking) and who takes a shine to one, then the other, or maybe both of the guys.
The film is essentially a massive mentoring session, with Nadie teaching Rafael that being of an obsessive-compulsive cast of mind has its upsides, while Daria helps illustrate the adage that faint heart never won fair lady – life lessons Rafael needs to learn.
It is vastly talky but also tender and funny. When Nadie arrives on the scene Rafael assumes he’s from the future, because aren’t they always? Nadie gently mocks him – Oh, so you’ve met some time travellers already? Rafael has seen Terminator, naturally, the cornerstone of so many people’s theoretical knowledge about time travel.
In fact, Nadie says, he is from the past, and his cultural references (Karate Kid, Bruce Lee, Back to the Future, Chuck Norris) would seem to back that up. Though of course we’re all guessing from the first arrival of Nadie, and from the visual nudges the director gives us, that the truth about Nadie is more mundane, and yet more consequential, than that.
There are no flying saucers, no special effects, just the black mask that Nadie wears, somewhat improbably, and which could, if you’re arguing, make this more a superhero movie than a sci-fi adventure.
Manuel Gutierrez is particularly well cast as Rafael, the guy it’s essential we like if this is going to work. And we do. He plays Rafael as a teenager trying to make his way in the world against internal headwinds. He is trying hard not to be the “it’s so unfair” moping teenager. He’s trying to grow up and to get out of the victim crouch. And so we’re rooting for him rather than finding him exasperating.
There are simple life messages in here, about everyone being a little crazy in their own way, alongside the theoretical discussions of time-travel anomalies. At one point, I am fairly sure, Nadie explains that time travel is not just theoretically but also practically impossible, which is possibly a meta joke.
Later, Nadie erects that thought into a philosophy, quoting a line from Schopenhauer. “No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life.” A time-travel movie whose big message is – live in the present. Novel.
Nobody Is Crazy – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
