On top of everything else that has happened in 2016, the year also marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, a film that offers one of the most depressing yet credible portrayals of a near-future fascist Europe . Based on P.D. James’ eponymous novel, it gives us a glimpse into the grim world of 2027 where, due to widespread infertility, no child has been born in 18 years. In Cuarón’s chilly, dystopian vision of Britain, desperate refugees flock to one of the last remaining functioning states in the world and are routinely rounded up and dumped in brutal internment camps. The setting brings to mind the horrific images of today’s European quasi-internment camps, Lampedusa and the now-defunct Calais.
Children of Men received widespread acclaim on its release, garnering three Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography and Editing, though it fared surprisingly poorly at the box office. However, despite its lukewarm commercial performance (it failed to so much as break even on its $76 million budget) its reputation has steadily grown in the proceeding decade, proving once more that gross earnings offer little indication of a movie’s calibre. This is particularly pertinent in an age where the industry relies on churning out a dizzying conveyor belt of lobotomised cookie-cutter comic book blockbusters.
Directed and co-written by Cuarón ( also renowned for his 2013 epic, Gravity), it features an enviable cast that includes Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Danny Huston, Chiwetel Ejiofor and the impeccable Michael Caine. The plot is quite uncluttered: Owen plays Theo, a former dissident-turned cynical bureaucrat who is kidnapped by a group of militant revolutionaries – among them, his estranged wife played by Julianne Moore – fighting against an oppressive fascist regime in order to protect the “fugees”, or refugees. Whilst in their hold, he meets Kee, the young woman (Clare-Hope Ashitey) they are protecting before discovering her secret: she is inexplicably pregnant. Upon discovering the kidnappers plan to kill him as a means to use the baby as a political tool, Theo escapes with Kee and seeks the help of his pot-dealing friend Jasper (Caine) to smuggle her onto a boat owned by the Human Project- a scientific group searching for a cure to the infertility crisis.
There is no explanation offered for the cause of humanity’s inability to reproduce; Cuarón famously dislikes gratuitous exposition and back-stories in films. We are left to ponder the origins of this apocalyptic vision by ourselves – the directorial message is clear: it is the subtext we ought to focus on. And subtext there is in abundance.
Though it may be ostensibly a sci-fi movie, the enduring power of Children of Men lies not in the dazzling cinematography or thrilling action sequences that have become de rigeur for the genre (though it offers these too) but instead in the political tones it conveys, and at times in an overt manner. The setting is not a Britain of futuristic technology and innovation, it is a nightmarish police state overrun with refugees and boiling with paranoia and violent xenophobia. In a powerfully visceral realisation of what contemporary far-right European movements warn us of, we are shown hauntingly believable sequences of terrified and desperate asylum seekers transported like cattle. These same sequences call to mind the not-so-distant memories of the Holocaust – the symbolism of which is made even more potent with the use of The Libertines’ “Arbeit Macht Frei” at one point while Homeland Security strip and beat illegal immigrants in an unmistakably Nazi-esque fashion. This, combined with legendary composer John Tavener’s hauntingly spiritual score and Emmanuel Lubezki’s exquisite photography, make the film feel like a contemporary Schindler’s List more than a conventional sci-fi flick. Lubezki – acclaimed for his work on visual masterpieces such as The Tree of Life, The Revenant and Gravity – lends Children of Men a distinctly documentarian feel with his cinema verité approach and hand-held camera sequences.
Made a decade before the present day and set a decade after it, Children of Men offers one of the prescient insights into the world that fuels the rhetoric of the likes of UKIP and le Front National. In the same year that fed-up Britons voted to leave the European Union and almost sixty million Americans elected the unapologetically reactionary populist Donald Trump to the White House, Cuarón’s vision seems all too plausible. Anyone who wants to understand the catastrophic results of the dehumanisation of migrants could do much worse than watch this movie. Indeed, depictions of immigration and the experiences of refugees in Europe have become increasingly prolific in European cinema over the last decade, just as the migrant crisis has further deteriorated. Among the most notable of these is Alejandro Inarritu’s movingly realist Biutiful, starring Javier Bardem, in which the brutal conditions of illegal Chinese workers in sweatshops are unflinchingly shown. Similarly, in Italian director Andrea Segre’s 2011 feature Shun Li and the Poet, the Chinese protagonist’s experiences with racial prejudices in a northern Italian community highlight the increasingly pervasive hostility to foreigners across the continent. This hostility has given much ammunition to the far right, anti-refugee platform not just in Italy and France, but also in the supposedly “liberal, progressive” Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Denmark. More recently, we have Irish filmmaker Tadgh O’Sullivan’s documentary, The Great Wall, an adaptation of a Kafka short story which centres on modern European border surveillance and the construction of fences throughout the continent. This year, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocammare (Fire at Sea), a documentary about the chronic situation on the Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa, received critical praise for its exploration of the impact of African migrants on the native community.
With the shockwaves of Trump’s victory still resonating, critical elections coming up in France and Germany (both of which are at risk of electing anti-immigration leaders) and no amelioration in the influx of boatloads of Syrian refugees across the Mediterranean in sight, Children of Men looks more and more prophetic. Cinema is still in the early stages of dealing with the political crisis of the century so far, and while there will undoubtedly be more films combatting this polemical topic in the coming years, few are likely to reproduce the impact of Cuarón’s 2006 tour de force.
