22 October 2006
children of men
An incredible vision of Britain not altogether so very far away, and close enough to be truly terrifying. The beaten up buses, the piles of rubbish, the burning corpses of farm animals, the grey tired whirr of a post-industrial landscape that never got round to clearing up its machinic residue. A countryside in flames and anomie, stalked by militant groups and robocops, fuelled only by disinformation and rumour...and soundtracked by Kode 9.
Children of Men is relentless: a war-zone between the mawkish sentimentality of a dying culture and the bleak prison of an island desperate to keep out the rest of the world. Scenes of torture and execution in out-of-town detention centres (Bexhill), cages for 'illegals' on the street, non-stop security alerts and passport checks, random terror attacks by unknown organisations. This is a world in which the majority of the globe has been vaporised by nuclear war, although dear old Britain has somehow survived - but only at the expense of turning into a fascist state. The Ministry of Art has saved Michelangelo's David, but his leg is prosthetic and its setting (a filmic fusion of the Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station, the latter complete with Pink Floyd Pig), is disturbing and out of public sight.
What is most intriguing about the premise behind the film (based on P. D. James's unusual venture into dystopia) is less the idea that humanity has somehow lost its fertility (although this is intriguing enough), but the vision of what this would do to our collective psyche: a species in meltdown, living with the revelation that all has come to nothing, and will go back to nothing in the space of a generation. Already animals are seeping back into colonised spaces (and Alfonso Cuaron matches Herzog in his ability to capture the silent menacing presence of creatures, from kittens to seagulls), waiting for this bipedal dodo-ish blot on the organic landscape to seep back into history.
The world may be mad, but we are insane.
