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Wednesday, September 4, 2024

Federico J. Arioni's Nobody Is Crazy

Cody takes a look at a story of time travel and insanity.

Director Federico J. Arioni has made a lot of short films over the last fifteen years or so, and in 2015 he made his feature directorial debut with the crime film Por un puñado de pesos (For a Handful of Pesos). Dated 2019, his second feature Nadie está loco / Nobody Is Crazy has been making its way out into the world over the last couple of years – it’s now available to watch on the Tubi streaming service – and it’s worth a look.

An independent production made in Neuquén, Patagonia, Argentina, Nobody Is Crazy centers on 16-year-old Rafael J. Blanco, who has always displayed signs of having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but his condition got much worse once his adoptive parents split up a few years ago. His mom sent him to a psychiatrist for the first time when was 12, but these attempts at treatment have never worked because Rafael has never put much effort into the idea of getting better. Instead, he has stopped going to school and withdrawn even more. He doesn’t talk very much, he doesn’t have friends, he has problems socializing. His father, who he doesn’t see much of anymore, thinks the way to handle him is to send him off to military school… and now his mom agrees. If he’s not cured soon, he’ll be sent away.

The latest attempt to cure Rafael involves him attending group therapy three times a week. It’s while he’s attending these groups, which are held near a mental health facility, that he crosses paths with a guy who calls himself Nobody (played by Arioni himself) and is always wearing gloves and a domino mask. Nobody claims to be a time traveler, although he bounces around the decades without the use of a time machine. All he needs to move from year to year is for a mysterious fellow called The Mute to show up and light a cigarette. When the cigarette gets lit, Nobody loses consciousness and wakes up in a different time and location. He says this has been his life for the last ten years.

Nobody befriends Rafael because he says he’s looking for someone who sees things in a different way and is willing to go on adventures, and Rafael seems to fit the bill. So Rafael and Nobody spend some days hanging out and talking – and if you like dialogue-heavy movies, as I do, that are primarily about two people talking, something like Clerks or Before Sunrise, you might enjoy Nobody Is Crazy, because most of the film’s 110 minute running time is taken up by scenes of Nobody and Rafael talking while making their way around  Neuquén. Usually it’s just the two of them, sometimes they also hang out with a local girl named Daria (Lara Ammi Wheeler), who is basically Rafael’s dream girl because she likes manga, anime, and weird movies. She would probably like this one as well, because I have a feeling that most viewers would categorize this as a weird movie.

Much of the conversations deal with time travel, as Nobody explains that the timeline is rigid and can’t be changed. If a time traveler alters someone’s life in the past, it doesn’t change the future. It just adjusts that person’s life to the way it was always supposed to be. All of this has been pre-determined and is set in stone. Nobody doesn’t know who or what the Mute is, whether he be an alien, a god, an angel, or a demon, all he knows is that he causes him to time travel.

Of course, you have to keep in mind that all of this is happening in the vicinity of a mental health clinic, where one of the young patients, one who has a habit of wearing gloves at all times, has recently escaped. So Rafael isn’t sure whether to believe what Nobody is saying, or if he happens to be the escaped mental patient. Thus the title.

I won’t spoil which way it goes, but I will say that I enjoyed watching Nobody Is Crazy. This is exactly the sort of movie I would have loved to come across when I was 16 years old myself, and it still worked for me at the age of 40. It was fun to watch Rafael and Nobody interact, and I liked the conversations they would have. This is a well-written, entertaining movie that sort of reminded me of Donnie Darko, although it’s much more lighthearted than that film. It’s also clear that Arioni has a fondness for Back to the Future, even if time travel here is said to work in a very different way than what we saw in BTTF.

If you like dialogue and time travel, seek out the fun and charming Nobody Is Crazy.

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