>>FEATURE
CHILDREN OF MEN
STARRING: Clive Owen and Julianne Moore
DIRECTED BY: Alfonso Cuarón
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With its decrepit cities, enormous refugee camps, rampant violence and state-sponsored suicide program, the Britain of 2027 in Children of Men is no one’s idea of a prime tourist destination. Yet it would be foolish to mistake this grim vision of humankind for a cautionary tale. As its director points out, the future it presents is already here.
"I don’t think it’s a science-fiction movie," says Alfonso Cuarón of his new film, a bleak but brilliantly realized adaptation of the novel by P.D. James. "What we tried to do was not to create universes but to reference reality. We wanted to do a film that would explore the themes that are shaping the first decade of the 21st century."
With imagery drawn largely from the media – "We wanted to reference images that were in human consciousness already," says Cuarón – emerging issues of immigration and environmental degradation are fundamental to the story. Clive Owen stars as Theo, a cynical former radical who is asked by his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) to help protect a very special young woman. Humans having become infertile many years before, Theo is shocked that Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) is pregnant. Though only a "fugee" (slang for refugee), she is of enormous value to an array of competing groups, including activists who don’t agree with Julian’s plan to deliver her to a possibly mythic organization named the Human Project.
The urgency of Theo’s effort to save Kee is amplified by the manner in which the story is told. It’s essentially a chase film, as Cuarón readily admits, "It borrows more from Sugarland Express than it does from Blade Runner." More significantly, the majority of the film is comprised of an astonishing series of long shots, the handiwork of Cuarón’s longtime cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, whose other credits include The New World and Sleepy Hollow. For Children of Men, they decided to repeat the approach they used on Cuarón’s 2001 racy drama Y tu mama tambien, avoiding close-ups and cuts so as to emphasize the characters’ place in their social environments and hopefully capture "a moment of truthfulness."
Cuarón says it wasn’t so different than what they did in the earlier film, though as he notes, "in that case, it was usually two people talking and maybe the biggest stunt was people having sex. These scenes involved battles, chases, explosions and all of that stuff – that complicated things. And there the social environment was Mexico while here it was a social environment that we had to create."
A discussion of cinema’s greatest proponents of the long shot prompts Cuarón – a passionate movie lover who also co-produced another of the season’s best films, Pan’s Labyrinth – to suspend the interview so he can act out his favourite scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Yet he also says that he and Lubezki didn’t want Children of Men to be just about the long shots.
"Whenever we felt the shot was calling attention to itself, we cut," he says. "That would go against the idea of creating a moment of truthfulness because suddenly the moment is not the important thing, but the shot."
One of the most riveting scenes in any recent film, Children of Men’s climactic sequence actually went even longer but Cuarón decided it had gone on long enough. Indeed, the film’s extraordinary level of detail and degree of technical accomplishment do not overshadow Cuarón’s core intention, which is to hold up a mirror to contemporary society. "Even if they distort reality a little," he says, "those mirrors can raise the right questions in the audience."
If the dystopia of Children of Men seems too extreme, he argues that our own epoch would have seemed implausible to an earlier generation. "If I told you in the ’70s that I want to make a movie about the massive migration of people from underdeveloped countries to developed countries and how the U.S. will spy on its own citizens, step out of the Geneva Convention, condone torture and build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, you’d tell me that cannot happen, that that’s an extreme worse-case scenario. But we’re living that reality now. We’re living that dystopia we always had nightmares about."
Lest all this sound like mere whinging and doom-mongering, Children of Men’s final moments do convey the idea that the world can be a different place, if you want it to be. "There’s a possibility of hope," says the director. "If people choose to believe in it, they can start thinking about what we will do with that hope. Because we’re not living in times of cautionary tales – we cannot caution anymore. It’s too late to do cautions – we need transformations. I believe hope can be a big springboard for transformations." |
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