Uberto Pasolini (2020)
Describing his four-year-old son to potential adoptive parents, John, the child’s birth father, mentions that ‘Michael doesn’t say much’. There’s no arguing with that. Throughout the ninety-odd minutes of Nowhere Special, John (James Norton) and Michael (Daniel Lamont) meet with candidates for adopting or fostering Michael – four couples, one woman on her own. After the fifth meeting, with the most unsuitable pair of the lot, Michael asks his father what adoption is and says he doesn’t like the idea of it. It’s the first evidence of curiosity on the boy’s part as to why he and John keep going to the homes of complete strangers.
The father is looking for a new home for his son in tragic circumstances. A Belfast window-cleaner in his mid-thirties and a devoted single parent, John is terminally ill. Writer-director Uberto Pasoloini (no relation, though he is Luchino Visconti’s nephew) is discreet about the nature of the illness, presumably cancer. There’s one brief hospital sequence, where he sits in a waiting area alongside a chemo patient, but John isn’t shown receiving treatment or talking with a doctor. At one point, he throws up; at another, he struggles to retain his balance and is angry when he can’t. Yet there’s nothing to suggest he’s in physical pain or worried that his condition might jeopardise his ability to look after Michael in the short term. After so recently defending Our Friend’s reticence about the bodily horrors of cancer, I seem to be applying a double standard in criticising Nowhere Special for doing the same. But it’s so central to Pasolini’s story that John is dying and having to cope alone, that his declining health and Michael’s apprehension (perhaps in both senses of the word) need to register more than they do.
Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Layburn’s Ordinary Love (2019), which shares with Nowhere Special a cancer theme and, coincidentally, a Belfast setting, was limited by the total isolation of the married couple at the centre of the story: there was no sign of family, friends or neighbours – or indication that any of these were fearfully avoiding the main characters. John’s situation is less straightforward and more credible. He himself grew up in care homes; the lack of family is easy to accept. Michael’s mother returned to her home country of Russia when the boy was a few months old; she and John are no longer in touch. In an early scene, when John gets back from work, he talks with a grey-haired woman who’s been looking after Michael and doing some ironing; she never reappears but it’s enough to make clear that John has a child minder to call on. His commitment to his son rules out much of a social life outside working hours. He’s personable, though, and people appear to know what he’s now up against. A pub landlord gives him a drink on the house; a garage owner discounts MOT test charges; John gratefully accepts their generosity. Rosemary (Stella McCusker), an elderly widow whose windows he cleans, talks with him about death and bereavement.
After several interviews with couples, John tells Shona (Eileen O’Higgins), the social worker who accompanies him and Michael on their visits, he’s always assumed that he’ll know instantly when he meets the right carer(s) for his son. The next person they meet is evidently just that: you see it not only in James Norton’s eyes but also in DP Marius Panduru’s golden lighting of John’s beatific face. Thirtyish Laura (Louise Mathews) explains that she was a teenage mother who had to give up her baby. She immediately starts playing with Michael, and he’s easy in her company. When, to everyone’s surprise (including the viewer’s), he asks a question about death, Laura answers Michael frankly but sensitively. There’s no follow-up to this meeting. Instead, Michael and his father are subjected to Lorraine (Niamh McGrady) and Trevor (Caolan Byrne). Lorraine, after announcing that pregnancy wasn’t for her, remarks that Michael doesn’t look much like his photograph. Her husband hands a toy rabbit to Michael before showing John his pride and joy – a model railway which, Trevor makes clear, is too precious for Michael to play with for some years yet. At the end of the encounter, the couple asks for the rabbit back.
This interview triggers a tirade from John (his only one) when he and Shona next talk. He asks how come the likes of Lorraine and Trevor are allowed anywhere near children; he doesn’t say a word about the previous candidate and nor does Shona. In the film’s closing scene, John and Michael return to Laura’s council flat: she welcomes Michael into his new home. Keeping Laura on ice as Pasolini does, takes the artificial structure of Nowhere Special to a new level. In the meantime, John has sold his car and window-cleaning equipment, and prepared a memory box for Michael. John looks paler now but it’s not obvious that he’s otherwise weaker. There’s no sense of urgency or desperation in any of this, just a gentle, persistent melancholy (and increasing use of Andrew Simon’s McAllister’s hitherto tactful guitar music). Pasolini’s I’ll-do-things-when-it-suits-me storytelling is in jarring contrast to his protagonist’s predicament.
Pasolini’s priority is the father-son relationship and it’s certainly hard to fault James Norton, Daniel Lamont or the direction of their scenes together. Lamont, from Ballymena, really was only four years old when the film was shot. Michael’s words may be few but the puzzled stare on his naturally comical face is magnetic. Norton relates to him effortlessly, and his own acting is admirably well judged. It’s no surprise to see him get inside the skin and head of a working man, or hear him handle another regional accent comfortably, but it’s still exhilarating to experience. Norton also enjoyably illustrates the hero’s native impetuosity. After a new client (Sean Sloan) nastily disparages his window cleaning, John returns to chucks eggs at the man’s house and car windows. In a nice punchline to this, when he and Michael are supermarket shopping, John suddenly remembers they’re out of eggs.
There’s a downside to Pasolini’s concentration on the main pair. Nearly all the rest of the cast have only one or two scenes, and, with few exceptions (notably Louise Mathews), tend to make too much of their few minutes on screen. Other than Lorraine, Trevor and John’s lone dissatisfied customer, the people in the story are decent, which might have been refreshing if they weren’t also bland. (Because they’re bland, the tendency to overplay them is more conspicuous.) Nowhere Special, according to the closing titles, was ‘inspired by a true story’. Its subject and central performances are enough for the film to be absorbing and poignant but it’s a rickety piece of drama.
4 August 2021
