Children of Men

I often have thoughts about things which I find hard to articulate. I know I think something about those things, but I'm not entirely sure what. One example that sticks out in my mind was a poster which had a London street, and everyone's heads had been replaced with security cameras. I think the slogan was something like: "Help your community by reporting suspicious activity." or something, but I found the poster very creepy. I wrote a blog about it but I wasn't able to articulate my thoughts completely so I abandoned it.

A similar poster which creeped me out was the series that had: NOT PAYING YOUR LICENSE FEE IS A CRIME. This was nicely parodied in the film Children of Men, except the slogans were: HARBORING IMMIGRANTS IS A CRIME and AVOIDING FERTILITY TESTS IS A CRIME. And I thought it was a cool parody, but I can't tell you why I thought it was cool, just that I somehow knew it. And I kind of like that ambiguously meaningful dialogue in films, where you're not entirely sure what is being said, but you're almost certain something is. I usually know if I like a piece of static art if it engenders that sort of feeling in me. The whole film is choc with little moments like that, from the over-the-counter suicide pill called 'Quietus' (ha!) to the Diana-like despair bought on by the death of the world's youngest person.

That's not to say that all the symbolism in the film is equally subtle- the film literally hammers home the point that 'children are the future', and goes a bit overboard when they spend a lot of the film trying to get the baby (who represents hope, see?) to a boat called 'Tomorrow' (which represents, uhm...tomorrow, geddit?).

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. The film is set in a dystopian Britain in 2027, in which the rest of the world has seemingly collapsed into chaos (there's a hilarious ad shown at one point which shows the rest of the world's major citites being devastated in various different ways, followed up with the slogan: "Only Britain soldiers on!"), due to the fact that no babies have been born for the last 18 years. The reason for this is never given, which I think is a wise choice- it's just part of the film's reality. The world is neatly and quickly established as an exaggeration of present day Britain. Immigrants are forced into town-sized prisons for deportation, crime is rampant, policing is brutal. Youth is worshipped, happiness is sold in pill form, cannibis is still illegal (heh).

It's not an uplifting film, in fact I think there's barely one moment of levity in the entire process. But it's beautifully well constructed- Alfonso Cuarón, who directed the two very beautiful films Y tu mamá también and Harry Potter 3, does a great job in creating the grim London of the future (there were several shots of places I recognized, and I've no idea how they managed to film them), and there is a running battle in Bexhill that is artfully choreographed and nicely vicious.

I wouldn't call this a great film, it's certainly depressing and the narrative seemed to lack a clear direction, but I've been pondering it on and off since I saw it, thinking about the ramifications of the conceit and how they were represented, and enjoying that vague feeling of not quite knowing what I thought. That's better than one of those films you just forget straight away, isn't it?