Uberto Pasolini’s “Nowhere Special” has a premise that can immediately wring your sentiments. John (James Norton), 34, is perhaps the loveliest father imaginable and his kid, Michael (Daniel Lamont) an exceptionally polite boy. John is a single parent. He is a window cleaner who regards himself as absolutely useless. His self-esteem is always low. When he scrubs the windows of a house, we watch him eagerly peer into the room of a young boy. He keeps returning in anticipation of seeing that boy play around in his room. We come to learn that John is dying and, therefore, planning to find adoption for Michael.
John even doesn’t want Michael to have any keepsakes of him, no proper memory of him. His crushing low regard for himself makes him desire for his son to have a whole clean slate. Then there’s the question of how he can ease Michael into the knowledge of his impending death. He doesn’t wish to hastily spring the difficult reality on his son, but time is running out. He resists the idea of parting with a memory box.
Daniel Lamont’s impossibly innocent, tender face reveals confusion and fear so beautifully that I felt like reaching out and giving him a hug. A child’s escalating awareness of his parents’ precarious health calls for the most sensitive cinematic rendition, and Lamont matches every beat of the heartbreaking journey with unerring poignance.
Pasolini doesn’t try to forcefully tap the emotional buttons. The devastation is quiet yet enormous, bursting from the most minutely rendered, smaller moments, exchanges, or in the passing of a fraught look. But there is also a giddy rush of joy and exhilaration peppering mundane situations. The sense of mortality spikes a shopping expedition of the father and son with pure ecstasy. It’s an absolutely delightful moment.
There’s scope here for abundant melodrama. After all, the story lends itself to an immediate gush of emotion, but the film wisely keeps it in check, even as it manages to be utterly piercing. Anchoring it all is James Norton in a performance that’s rarely attention-grabbing though he plays the kind of character who can be an easy emotional sell. Empathy with such a narrative direction wouldn’t be a tall ask. But how one makes it resistant to cheapening emotional exploitation requires a degree of perceptiveness and restraint that would account for all the critical differences in the film’s vision of its inherent sadness.
This is an inordinately weepy film; however, Pasolini significantly reins it in and lets it explode only in spare scenes. Its tightening concentration of emotional release is the key reason behind the film’s utter sobering lack of a misty-eyed lens. Through the motley characters who pop up in the journey of the father to find a parent/family for his kid, we get windows into richly rendered rhythms of varied lives. The tone is neither syrupy nor too severe; Pasolini’s screenplay strikes a perfect balance where the tragedy registers in all its depth, yet there’s also a sliver of hope and reaffirmation strongly signaled in its statements of clutching onto life despite being barrelled by crippling bleakness.
For such a wearily grim heart, the film casts off cynicism and pokes at fresh hope, associating it with a reinvigoration of life, yanking out a deep, palpably enduring essence from flaky embers. How long can John afford to keep deferring and making a choice? John confesses having had a simpler notion of the whole process. He admits thinking he’d be able to make his decision quickly right after a preliminary interaction with the parents. He thought he’d almost instantly know whether they were the right fit or not. But as the quest evolves, layers add on, rendering his ability to make his judgment tougher and elusive.
The film gestures to a wider expansiveness in forming perceptions and especially acknowledging their gradual change on being tempered by experience and realization. John is racked by growing confusion and a lingering sense of haunting that he might be capable of making a grievous error in choosing his child’s new family and thereby hurling him toward a dangerously risky future. As he nudges his son toward an awareness of loved ones hovering in the air long after they pass, “Nowhere Special” achieves spellbinding emotional force.
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