Children of Men: End of the world looks promising with Cuar
The world set for an end seems to be constant food for creativity in the west. We have seen Blade Runner and many more. However Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of P.D. James’s novel stands out for more than a couple of reasons.
According to the writer, her novel attempted to answer the question “”If there were no future, how would we behave?” The film begins quite grimly with a newscast of the youngest world citizen’s death. He was eighteen years old. World has seen no childbirth since. A world that is doomed to grow old and die.
Rest of the world has already collapsed and its only London that soldiers on, reads a public service display. In this highly chaotic and failing world, lives our hero, a disillusioned revolutionary and disgruntled public servant, Theo. His loss of sense of a mission is equally reflected in the collective loss of dream of future for society at large.
Since, rest of the world has collapsed, London is the only place to be. Swarms of immigrants constantly flood the city who are confined in cages by roadside. And an underground group called Fishes is fighting for their equal rights.
The world that Cuarón creates is strikingly similar to the one we live in today however the anxieties that lie at the heart of such a dystopian view of the future are predominantly western. Instead of getting into symbolism of infertility, I would say that it’s the west that’s ageing rapidly and having nightmares about the loss of future. And again it’s the west that is constantly feeling the threat of immigration from the underdeveloped nations. The world that “Children of Men” conjures up is in fact a worldview of the west. The world would look quite different if seen from somewhere else.
Coming back to the film, so our hero Theo is abducted by the Fishes and given a task to arrange exit visa for Kee, the woman who holds the key to the future. The only pregnant woman to be seen in the last eighteen years. Soldiers bow down to her, and different people want her baby for different purposes. Protection of this baby, the future of mankind, gives Theo a sense of purpose in life.
The London that the film creates is a remarkable one. There are garbage bags everywhere. Three wheeler auto rickshaws fill up the environment with smoke. Armed policemen with their sniffer dogs are omnipresent. People are constantly reminded on the ever-present threat of a terrorist attack. And the most eye-catching imagery- roadside cages for immigrants.
Cuarón brilliantly creates a sense of decay in every shot of the film. A feeling of loss, pessimism and death fills the mood. A vision of loss of dream can’t get more eye-catching than this.
Thought provoking…
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Was really looking forward to this film until I saw the trailer in the theatre – gives everything away and leaves you with nothing to look forward to.
Highly urging everyone to go see this film. The trailer misrepresents the film actually. Its Hollywood pop editing, and they try to really squeeze everything marketable into one trailer. the film itself is more meditative, more held back, and any reviewer who doesn’t acknowledge Lubetzki’s glorious camerawork is just not being fair. Here, in this film, are three long takes that will make you absolutely drool. Try decoding how they lit it, designed it and made it work. It will make your head spin. Its delicious, its layered and its very thought-provoking.
Thanks for the heads-up suds, will be looking out for the long takes
Yes Suds, how can i miss the breathtaking long takes….
Saw this film yesterday. I had a mixed reaction to it. Absolutely loved the production design and phenomenal camerawork. The sound design too was brilliant. Cuaron’s direction was engaging and managed to hold me as a viewer till the end.
However, the film did not really enlighten me. The pessimism over the future of our world dominated the narrative, but was not developed enough to specifically make a comment on it. The crux of the story was the inability of mankind to reproduce, but terrorism, governmental paranoia etc leading to the demise of the world seemed to attract more attention. The entire point of the movie, which centers around saving the first baby in 18 years, seems lost because the premise of why man is infertile is not developed.
While its original concept and smart direction, kept me interested, I expected more from a phenomenal actor like Clive Owen. Performances were adequate, but did not do justice to the calibre of actors involved. Overall, Children of Men is a clear example of a director’s craft succeeding over relatively weak material.