Review: When A Woman Ascends The Stairs

Originally posted at Epinions



There are times when the academic in me comes out and I really want to talk about a film in the context of something greater than itself. That context may be the director’s body of work, a genre, a time period, or possibly a national cinema. Mikio Naruse’s When A Woman Ascends the Stairs is one of those films.

Why do I want to discuss it in relation to other films? Perhaps it’s the assertion that Naruse is one of Japan’s great directors; it is not unthinkable for his name to come up alongside the names of Ozu and Mizoguchi. He also has an extensive body of work spanning the decades from the early thirties to the late sixties. And while his work has been discussed in terms of his early experimental period and his later
post-war work, the themes have remained consistent throughout.

These are the reasons I would like to talk about When A Woman Ascends the Stairs beyond the experience of a single viewing.

However, there is one very good reason why I cannot. Simply, I’ve never seen another Naruse film. What I know about him, I know from reading. Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, these directors I know, I love, and I’ve seen a number of their films. There is a lot that I can talk about. Why is Naruse different? One reason: his films are not widely available in the west. Occasionally there will be a screening, a retrospective, something of that sort, but for the most part our choices are limited. In the US we
have access to all of one of his films, When A Woman Ascends the Stairs, on DVD. If you’re lucky you may be able to find another film, Lady Chrysanthemums, on VHS. Your choices are slightly less limited in Europe but not by much.

I can’t tell you why Naruse’s films are so hard to see in the West but I can tell you that it is a shame. This is another point where I would like to discuss him in the context of his contemporaries. Since I can’t I will skip all of that and discuss When A Woman Ascends the Stairs in more limited terms.

The story of When A Woman follows Keiko, an aging bar hostess working in the Ginza district. She has reached a point in her life where she must decide between her options of marriage and the opening of her own place.Keiko is a unique woman in her world of liquor, men, geisha, family responsibility, and, those ideas that are always just out of reach, love and happiness. She tries to stay above the world around her, she never gives in to the men, but in the end, how long can a woman hold out when all of the tides are against her? And when her choice is between virtue and love, can we really blame her for giving in to either option?

When A Woman Ascends the Stairs is a melodrama. It is a sensitive exploration of the choices given to women trapped in Japan’s class system. The choices become a matter of survival. But even death does not bring freedom.Keiko is never given the option of making the right decision. Whatever path she follows, it will be wrong for someone and she has obligations to all.

While the visuals of When A Woman never moved me as much as, for example, those found in an Ozu film and while I never felt quite as invested in the fate of Keiko as I did in Mizoguchi’s heroine of Osaka Elegy, When A Woman touched me. Naruse’s Keiko becomes a sympathetic character and the themes he explores are just as important and relevant as anything found in any of our other favorite Japanese films.Naruse shows his social consciousness. We care about Keiko. There is a point to be made and by the end of the film, we get it.

Keiko is trapped in her life by the demands and social strictures of the world she lives in. Repeatedly she performs the action described by the title of the film, but her ascension is not one to be envied. She is not ascending to something greater, she finds at the top of her stairs the dead end that she can never hope to escape. Her climb is an exercise in futility. She will continue to travel up and up, finding at
the end only the same dingy bars and the same groping men.

Perhaps one day I will be able to tell you more about Naruse and his films. Until that point comes, all I can say is When A Woman Ascends the Stairs is worth your time. It’s a sad, poignant story that is still relevant for today’s audience. It may not be the greatest Japanese film I’ve ever seen but I am glad that I have seen it. And I look forward to the opportunity to discover more of Mikio Naruse.

A hint for those of you who are curious: it’s available on Netflix.

When A Woman Ascends the Stairs
1960
Japanese with English Subtitles
111 minute

Review: Driving Lessons

Originally posted at Epinions



When considering Driving Lessons, two questions come immediately to mind. First, will Rupert Grint be able to escape the world of Potter? Second, do I really need another indie coming of age story?

The answers: Yes. And No.

Driving Lessons is writer Jeremy Brock’s (The Last King of Scotland; Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown) first directorial effort. Supposedly inspired by events and memories of his childhood, Brock tells the story of Ben Marshall. Marshall is the seventeen and a half year old son of a preacher and an evangelical. His father is frustrated, his mother is insane. After she decides to take in the troubled Mr. Fincham, Ben is tasked with finding a job to help pay for Mr. Fincham’s recovery. All in the name of being a good Christian. The job Ben finds is an assistant position with the aging actress Dame Evie Walton. Through his experiences with Dame Evie, Ben discovers a bit about the world and more about himself.

It’s incredibly easy to compare this movie to many others (Harold and Maude for a start) and it never does venture far into the world of originality. It also follows closely the conventions of “Independent Cinema”. It falls comfortably into a group of films including such recent examples as Garden State and Squid and the Whale. All coming of age dramas about male protagonists with complicated family lives. And that’s not to say that any of these are bad films or that there is something wrong with fitting into this category. That’s just what it is. Personally, I like a little more spice in my diet.

Driving Lessons does step away somewhat in that it is never completely over run by the cynicism that other films affect. There is always an air of innocence and repeatedly I found myself thinking of the movie as being “sweet.” A large part of that is a credit to Rupert Grint.

Grint’s Ben and Julie Walters’ Evie are two characters who are meant to be together. While the relationship occasionally flirts with the idea of romance, for the most part it sits solidly in the realm of friendship. Evie is outlandish and Ben is stoic. Their personalities clash but compliment at the same time. One of my favorite scenes is one between the two of them in Evie’s garden. They recite Shakespeare and Ben moves from reluctant partner to enthusiastic participant. Again, it’s “sweet” but it’s also engaging and Grint is given a moment to really perform.

It’s another trap of the “indie” film that Brock falls into with his directing. For some reason, it seems a prerequisite to include a lot of shots of the protagonist staring blankly ahead. I think it’s supposed to convey a sense of frustration? Disillusionment? Disenchantment? Disappointment? Depression? More words beginning with a “D”? Impotence? Yes, I’m sure that staring straight ahead requires a vast amount of acting skill. Lets see that shot again please. Thank you.

Grint does manage to show promise as a young actor, he has some truly fine moments, but over all I don’t think that Driving Lessons ever fully takes advantage of whatever talent may be lurking behind his quiet exterior.

And while the directing in Driving Lessons is never bad, it’s nothing incredibly fantastic either. Technically, it’s a well done film. There are some excellent compositions, the editing is solid, the story’s pacing worked for me, there are good performances. It just never moves beyond competent.

It’s not a bad choice for a rainy afternoon, if you have nothing else you particularly wanting to see, or if, like me, you’re curious to see what Harry Potter’s young stars can do in a different venue. Just don’t expect the film of the year.

In addition to Grint and Walters, the cast is rounded out with Laura Linney as Ben’s mother, Nicholas Farrell as Ben’s father, Jim Norton as Mr. Finch, and Michelle Duncan as the cute and seductive Bryony.

Review: Live Free Or Die Hard

Originally posted at Epinions



The days are long, the temperatures are high, and the explosions are big. That’s right, it’s once again summer and the season of the blockbuster. It’s that fabulous time of the year where the cinema invites us to leave our brains at home while we escape the heat in the comforting darkness of the theater. The summer has returned, the blockbuster has returned, John McClane… has returned?

Over ten years have passed since the last Die Hard movie, 1995’s Die Hard: With A Vengeance, was released and the question is, can Bruce Willis still bring it as the tough guy cop who is just in the wrong place at the wrong time? I think the answer is a happy yes, yes he can.

And oh thank goodness for that. Because really, what we don’t need is another lackluster sequel killing a promising franchise (*cough* Spiderman 3). So believe me, I’m thrilled to say that Live Free or Die Hard delivers.

The premise is very 2007. Cyber-terrorists compromise the entire United States infrastructure through use of the internet, McClane is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it’s up to him and a hacker kid to save the day. Why is he that guy? Because someone needs to do it and there’s no one else.

The best part of this movie isn’t its plot. It’s not its depth and social insight (because there really isn’t any). The best things about this movie are the giant explosions, the ridiculous stunts, and the rapport between McClane and the hacker kid Matt Farrrell (Justin Long). I also liked McClane’s daughter. Or at least the part where she punched a bad guy in the face.

And really, that’s what the summer blockbuster is all about. Big explosions. Clever dialogue. Absurd stunts. You know what you’re getting the second you watch the trailer.

“You just killed a helicopter with a car.”
“I was out of bullets.”

And more along those lines.

Where does it stand in the context of the series? How does it fit in with the Die Hard franchise? I’m going to go ahead and agree with the friend I went to see the movie with: not as good as the third, better than the second, and definitely a Die Hard movie.

It’s bigger than the previous movies. The threat is bigger. As I’ve mentioned, the explosions and stunts are bigger. The consequences are bigger. Of course bigger isn’t always necessarily better. In places it felt too big, too spread out. The threat was a little ephemeral; it never feels real or incredibly plausible. It was always fun though. Which is what it comes down to. We’re going to see a Die Hard movie because John McClane is awesome and we love him.

There is something very wrong about this theatrical release however. Have you noticed the rating? Um, PG-13? Really? Who thought that was a good idea? Not only is nearly incomprehensible that they would make a Die Hard movie less than R, the movie actually suffers for it. Some of the edits are so incredibly bad you just can’t help but cringe. It makes me sad. I want to see the un-butchered R version. Oh well, that’s what the DVDs are for after all. We can’t just have the real version up front. We have to pay again to see it uncut in out own living rooms. Jerks.

So should you go see? Well, what did you think of the trailer? That’s your answer right there.

P.S. Kevin Smith has a small role as the Star Wars loving hacker “Warlock”. Yay.

Review: Knocked Up

Originally posted at Epinions



Knocked Up isn’t the sort of movie I will normally go see in the theater. It’s the sort I would normally wait to rent or wait for a friend to bring it over or maybe wait for it to show up on cable. 40 Year-Old Virgin was fun and all but not $10 (or more in certain places) worth of fun.

You know, occasionally, I can be wrong.

I did go see Knocked Up in the theater. In fact, I’ve seen it twice. It’s a movie that I thoroughly enjoy. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s moving. Sometimes it’s just plain wrong but it’s also down to earth and something that I think people can actually relate to. There are so many moments that make me think of my friends, situations they’ve been in, antics they’ve been up to. I’m not sure what that may say about myself and my friends but I like to think that it means Judd Apatow is somewhat in touch with reality.

Knocked Up is about Ben and Alison and the results of their drunken one night stand. Alison is a gorgeous blond who is working her way up in the entertainment news industry while Ben is an overweight stoner with about $100 to his name. From the title of the film the results of their one night are a given. It’s the journey they take over the next nine months that the film is concerned with. How do two people who are so different, headed in such different directions in life, reconcile themselves to a fate that has tied them together? Can they make it work? Is making it work enough?

Katherine Heigl and Seth Brogan star as Alison and Ben. They are joined by Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd as Alison’s sister Debbie and Debbie’s husband Pete; Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Martin Starr, and Charlyne Yi play Ben’s band of fellow stoners. Joanna Kerns, Harold Ramis, Alan Tudyk, and Kristen Wiig make appearances as well.

I really enjoyed all of the performances. Heigl and Brogan work well together, their chemistry is convincing and I believe in the relationship that slowly builds between them. It’s an awkward situation, to say the least, and I like the way that their characters work it out. I also enjoyed the supporting cast. Debbie and Pete create a great sub-plot that adds tension and conflict to not only their relationship but to Ben and Alison’s as well. As far as the stoners go, well, I may know a few people like that. They seemed fairly realistic to me.

As good as the acting in a film like this may be, what it really comes down to is the writing. And in that regard Knocked Up wins. As a comedy it kept me laughing through the entire film. The second time I watched it I still laughed the entire film. The jokes don’t get old, the movie is never boring. It’s a movie I can see myself buying and pulling out for a movie night with my friends, even when we’ve all seen it already.

My favorite part of the movie, two times through: The scene between Ben and Pete in the hotel room in Vegas. There really were a lot of chairs.

Knocked Up is a lot of fun. At a running time of just over two hours some people might get a little antsy but I don’t think it’s overly long. There aren’t any scenes that feel unnecessary. It’s all funny, it’s all well written, and it’s really all very likeable.

Production: A Sport Show

Tomorrow I start work on a sports show that's being shot for the Fox Sports Network (I think that's the deal). I'm going back to being scripty. A development I feel sort of ambivalent about. But hey, it's not a bad gig. Hopefully it will be fun.

I did most of my prepping today after spending a couple of days last week shadowing the Script Supervisor for the upcoming Comedy Central show American Body Shop (which has the potential to be hilarious btw). I'm a little excited about the work I got done today. I have new forms and templates that, at least aesthetically, I like a lot better than the ones I've used previously. I know I'm a dork. But I like the idea of paperwork that actually looks professional.

I also purchased a new digital camera. As well as my old one treated me, it had its limitations and it was just time to move on. So now I've got a little Casio that will hopefully be my new friend. As soon as I figure out how to turn the flash off...

And since I have to be up super early it's off to bed for me. Maybe I'll actually post stuff about what I'm doing during this job. That would be fun. We'll see.

Analysis: After Life

Frederick Jameson has written that one symptom of the post-modern is the nostalgia film; people have lost the ability to connect with the past and present and look to film to make those connections for them. A stream of the recently deceased pass through a way station and must look back on their lives and choose one memory to take with them into eternity. When watching Kore-Eda’s film After life, a post-modern reading is not far away. However, reading the film simply in terms of post-modernism does it a disservice. Kore-Eda has layered After life in meta-filmic moments that on one level suggest a post-modern meaning but on another show that film may still have the power to be meaningful.

The film introduces a variety of characters who reminisce over their lives, searching for their one perfect memory. Once the memory is found it is recreated on film. The person then watches the film of their memory and immediately moves on. In this moment, film is made absolutely necessary for people to reach peace and rest. On one level, this necessity can be read as people’s failure to connect with their pasts on their own, they need mediation. It is not truly their memories they are reliving but a simulacrum of life. One of these people, Watanabe, is an old man who cannot choose. He is looking for an evidence of life but is unable to remember anything. He on his own is unable to connect with his past and only through the use of videotapes can he remember it. These meta-filmic moments, the recreation of memories on film and the videos of a person’s life, reveal films use as a connective tool and leave room for a cynical reading of After life: we are trapped in a post-modern moment and the only escape is through false memories and into an eternity of simulacra, there is no hope.

Of course, Kore-Eda refuses to make his film so simple. In fact, he does offer hope. For example, with Watanabe, while it’s true he needs the videos to remember the past, these representations of memories do not actually help him choose. It is through two conversations, one with Iseya who refuses to choose and one with his counselor who was actually his wife’s fiancé before being killed in WWII, that Watanabe is finally able to choose. He is offered the easy solution of a false connection by randomly choosing a memory off of the tapes, but it is through real connections with other people that his choice is actually made. Another moment of Kore-Eda’s denial of post-modernism is through the girl Yoshino. Originally, she wants to choose a memory of Disneyland (the ultimate example of simulacra) but after a conversation with Shiori, one of the counselors, Yoshino changes her choice to a vague memory of her mother’s lap from when she was a little girl. She turns her back on simulacra and chooses something real.

It can still be said that even with the choice of real memory, by recreating it on film a new simulacra is still being made. And the question of why these films are necessary is never really satisfactorily answered within the narrative but by reading them as a comment by Kore-Eda on the nature of filmmaking itself, it is still possible to move past the post-modern reading. The memory films are not giving a false sense of reality, they are actually making moments of perfection from people’s lives livable again, if only briefly. One noticeable aspect of these memory films is their low budgets (a parallel with the reality of independent filmmaking). These low budgets lead to a necessity of creativity and simplicity. As a result, these films do not focus on creating a false sense of reality through fancy tricks but instead focus on creating a glimpse of the truth of reality through a lack of style. It seems that Kore-Eda is disavowing post-modernism and it’s claim that the possibility of negation no longer exists. Instead, there is a claim that film still has the ability to function as art and that the power of negation is still present.

Kore-Eda wants us to feel that what we are watching is real; he wants us to connect with the film in a meaningful way. He uses the meta-filmic moments to allow us to recognize that we are watching a film and to from there make real connections to it. We are not allowed to mindlessly absorb what we are being presented with, the film engages us and is able to succeed in offering an alternative to the belief in post-modernism. As the counselors watch the moon, one comments that it’s shape never changes only the light reflecting off it makes it appear to. After life could be saying the same thing about the meaningfulness of film and the reality of art and life that lies beneath it, it’s not the shape and possibilities that are changing but only our perceptions.

Analysis: Cruel Story of Youth

Oshima argues that it is necessary for a filmmaker to be actively involved in his work; he needs to put himself into his work and make it a part of his external reality. This can only be accomplished through an absence of style, through self-negation. The function of art is to stand outside of culture and offer a criticism and this can only be accomplished through negation. If a filmmaker allows himself to develop a signature style then that style becomes a commodity, it is only by resisting that temptation can a filmmaker create truly radical films. Oshima indicates that he is attempting to achieve this self-negation and by examining the sound design of his film Cruel Story of Youth it is possible to see the tension that he has managed to create between his film and the audience, between art and reality.

Sound is an incredibly important part of film; no matter how good the visual component of a film may be, bad sound will make it seem amateurish. In Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth it is apparent that the sound was not recorded synchronously and was rather dubbed in. Throughout the film there is very little ambient sound and while the sound effects match the visuals they seem removed, the lack of ambient sound creates a hollowness behind any sound effect. For example, in the scene when Mako is first seduced, Kiyoshi throws her into the water. The only sound in that scene is the dialogue between the two actors and the splashing of water. There are no footsteps, no passing cars or boats, no water other than the splashing, no wind. It is apparent that the sound was not recorded on site but perhaps later, in a studio. The result is that we are made very aware that what we are watching is a film. A tension is created between the desire to lose oneself in the film world and the inability to do so because Oshima is subtly reminding us that what we are watching is not, in fact, reality.

The music of the film is also significant. The diegetic music that plays is almost completely jazz. It characterizes their rebellion against expectations. They are the dissatisfied youth and jazz is their anthem. This choice of jazz is significant because it frequently characterizes attempts at rebellion but fails in the act of negation. Jazz can easily be commodified and when people listen to it or play it they are lulled into a false sense of individuality. They think they are rebelling already so they do nothing to actually rebel. What is it that Oshima is attempting to say about the current youth culture then? If the New Wave film movement in Japan, which this film is supposed to be a part of, is not about what the film stands for but rather what it stands against, as was suggested in class, then what this film is about is the new standing against the old. The presence of Jazz is possibly not there to signify rebellion; it is there to signify the separation of the youth generation from the generation that came before. The one time in the film when a non-jazz piece of music is played diegetically, Kiyoshi says “Bah, Beethoven,” but he then listens to it. He doesn’t actively rebel by changing the radio station, taking the focus away from rebellion, but his comment does bring the focus to difference.

Thoughts: Army of Darkness

“You ain’t leading but two things right now, Jack and Shit, and Jack just left town.”

So do I even need to mention that I love this movie? Or that I love Bruce Campbell? Or that when my mom tells me that she has never seen an Evil Dead movie I decide to sit her down immediately and show her Army of Darkness? I actually would have showed her all of them but Army of Darkness was the only I brought to Florida with me.

The movie is fantastic. It’s hilarious and full of slapstick, it’s got great lines, it’s got deadites, and it’s got lots and lots of Bruce Campbell. And a good amount of Bruce Campbell in half of a shirt. I enjoyed that.

What can I even say about the movie other than the fact that it’s great? It’s a cool, cool movie that’s not scary at all. At least I don’t think it is. But I’m not sure anyone could think it was really that scary with Ash being all Ash-like. Klaatu, Barrata, Necktie… cough, cough… There… I said the words…

Now was it just me, or did anyone else notice the ridiculous similarity between the beginning of the graveyard scene with Evil Ash and the part in Return of the King in front of Minis Morgul. Peter Jackson used almost the exact same shots when he does his freaky, dutch angel, zoom in on the statues right before the army comes marching out of the city as Sam Raimi uses right before his Skeleton Army leaves the graveyard to attack Ash and his primitive screwhead buddies. I thought that was nifty.

Man, the charge on my computer is going down fast. I think I’m gonna shut this down now so I can get some sleep. And while I’m sleeping you should go watch Army of Darkness. It’ll be a good time.

Hail to the King baby.

Analysis: Close To Eden

Close to Eden, or Urga, is a film about change. Gombo lives on the border of two lands, China and Russian, and he lives on the border between two times. Close to Eden explores the changing times and one of the most important characters in this exploration is the land itself.

The land becomes a character itself by the way Mikhalkov represents it with his camera. The way his camera wonders away from the action of the film and becomes lost in the hills and grass seems to imply that the land is more important than whatever may be happening to the people that live there. As Ghosh and Sarkar say in their article “The Cinema of Displacement: Towards a Politically Motivated Poetics,” “land is a cultural repository of memories and symbolic of a way of life. The point is made by the camera’s repeated privileging of landscape over action. Often, the camera will focus for several seconds on the plains, and all action is suspended.”

Gombo is a part of this land. He is of Mongolian descent and belongs himself more to the past than the present. He speaks fondly of Genghis Khan and hopes to have another son becomes Khan was a fourth son. His wife, a city girl, tries to persuade him to become a part of modern times. She insists he travel to buy condoms and a television set. When he enters the city, he obviously does not belong to it. He rides through on a horse and looks horribly out of place.

He finally makes the return trip with the television in tow, but he feels guilty about succumbing to the lures of the modern times. Ghosh and Sarkar point out a dream sequence he has on his return trip that illustrates his guilt. “The narrative repeatedly raises questions of home and its loss: in a Chinese nightclub, Sergei sings of the ‘Hills of Manchuria’; Gombo’s wife puts on her ancient Mongolian head-dress and gazes onto a glorious historical past and a disappeared ‘home’; Gombo himself has visions of Genghis Khan’s revenge on him because he is on the brink of forsaking his heritage.”

As they have pointed out, it is not only Gombo that is uncomfortable with the changing times, all of the characters of the film are anxious. All want to remain in the past where their roles and places are familiar. The end represents this past and familiarity. While everything around them has changed, the land has not. The green hills and the swaying grasses are timeless. However, the times are changing and the present enters Gombo’s home even in the midst of the timeless land around it.

Sergei, Gombo’s wife, and their neighbor all bring the modern to Gombo. Sergei is a Russian truck driver and brings another cultural to the land with his truck that cuts across it, leaving its tracks in the grass. Gombo’s wife brings the present in with her insistence that he buy a TV and birth control. Gombo’s neighbor brings souvenirs to Gombo, including an American movie poster. Gombo cannot resist the influx of the modern into his life; it comes from too many angles.

Gombo is a part of his land and of the past. Ghosh and Sarkar describe it as “’Home’ for Gombo is literally a humble shack surrounded by an undulating landscape where he grazes his horses. The open plains, seemingly unmarked by signs of ownership, are sometimes staked out as personal: Gombo plants his urga as a sign of privacy when he makes love to his wife on the grass.” Gombo is a part of the land. The only ownership that is ever claimed is that that they note, when he is making love to wife, an act that is as timeless and natural as the land itself.

The natural act of lovemaking is under attack in the film. Gombo’s wife does not want another child so she urges him to buy condoms. China has put limitations on how many children you may have, and Gombo has already exceeded that number. While he insists he is not a part of China so the law does not apply to him, he cannot ignore the urgings of his wife. His wife finally wins out and he goes to buy the condoms. However, in the end he does not succumb, he does not buy them and tells his wife that they were sold out.

He has however bought the television. He cannot resist all of the changes that are occurring and he cannot completely block out the modern world. As lovemaking has come under attack, by the end of the film so has the land. The final shots of the land that represented the richness of Gombo’s past are of a land that is no longer green and isolated from the world. The hills are covered by the tracks of trucks and a giant smokestack fills overwhelms the horizon. Gombo’s son works at a near by gas station and it seems that despite all of Gombo’s resistance to it, the present has overwhelmed the past.

Review: Children of Men

She would never say where she came from

Where does our humanity come from? When does the face in a crowd become more than just a face? What does it take to get us to connect with someone on an emotional, personal level?

In the terms of a film, where is the line between caricature and character drawn? When does the person on screen become more than just an actor playing a role? Where does empathy begin? When does humanness start?

Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone

There is a moment in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men where our hero Theo (Clive Owen) asks his cousin why he still bothers to save important pieces of art from destruction. Why bother when in a hundred years no one will be alive to see it? His cousin’s answer: he’s just stopped thinking about it. It has no meaning; it is just an exercise to keep himself busy. Even a task that would seem to be noble, seem to be culturally significant, becomes meaningless when there is no future, no one to appreciate it.

Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind

Children of Men is a bleak film. Set in the year 2027, it’s a vision of the future that brings to life our darkest fears. The human race is dying. The end is not a product of war; it is not a result of global warming or some other environmental catastrophe. The human race is dying because of a flaw within: women can no longer have babies. It has been 18 years since the last child was born and the world has collapsed into hopelessness and chaos. Britain alone can make claims of order and maintained social structure. However, order is a relative term. Bombs explode in coffee shops and illegal immigrants, people called “fugees”, are hunted down and rounded up like vermin.

On the grey streets of London, Theo is just another man in the crowd. He’s an alcoholic dragging through the horror that has become everyday life. That is until his love from a life long past grabs him off of the street and asks for his help. Julian (Julianne Moore) needs him secure travel papers for two women, the fugee Kee and the midwife Miriam (Pam Ferris). For motives never made completely clear, Theo agrees to aid them. In doing so, he discovers that there may be something in the world worth fighting for after all.

While the Sun is Bright

If you’ve read my review of A Little Princess then you may already know that I’m a huge fan of director Alfonso Cuaron and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. They worked together previously on both A Little Princess and the highly regarded Y Tu Mama Tambien. Additionally, Cuaron is well known for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban while Lubezki’s other credits include Terrance Malik’s The New World, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and, one of my personal favorites, the beautiful Like Water for Chocolate.

However, Children of Men is different from their previous films. Where many of their past works have hinted at the darker side of life, they all remain bright and hopeful. There is color and there is life. In Children of Men, the opposite is true. While there may fleeting glimpses of a sun lit park or a bright sunrise, the landscape here is desolate and grey. Even if hope is rediscovered in the end, color never is. A world without color is a sad one indeed.

In the darkest night

A world shrouded in sorrow has its own beauty. A man may rediscover his humanity and hope may be born again. The people of Children of Men always seem to maintain a distance from the audience, from each other, from themselves but this distance in ways serves to make them not characters but humans. How can we ever truly know what another person’s motives are? We may never discover exactly why Theo decided to help Julian and Kee, but in the end the why doesn’t matter. His why doesn’t matter, nor does Jasper’s, Marichka’s, or Miriam’s. What it comes down to is that in a world gone mad, humanity still exists. Heroes can be real.

This vision of chaos cannot escape from the parallels to our current society. The story is an allegory made all the more relevant by the acts of terror, the acts of war, the acts of genocide, and the intolerance that have plagued us in the recent past. While PD James’s novel may have been moving when it was released in 1992, Cuaron’s film is like a look in the mirror. It’s impossible to watch without seeing the unpleasant truths we turn away from in everyday life.

What is Truth? Sometimes it’s easier to discover through works of fiction than through statements of fact.

Don’t question why she needs to be so free

Of course in troubled times there is never a lack of films exploring our anxieties and fears. What sets Children of Men apart from the other distopian films of recent years (i.e. V for Vendetta) is how it handles the material. While V may paint a dark picture of the future, it is still a slick high budget affair concerned more with showcasing flashy explosions and Natalie Portman’s pretty face than anything else. V was made to entertain. Children of Men was made to tell a story.

Lubezki embraces a pseudo documentary approach using natural sources of light and allowing the camera to film whatever image its attention is drawn to. In one scene, Theo walks through the woods and for a moment the camera is distracted. Rather than follow Theo, it glances up and gives us a dizzying view of the heights of the trees. In another scene, there is a moment when two officers are shot after a violent car chase. The camera jumps out of the car with Theo but when Theo leaves, the camera lingers on the officers allowing us to absorb the shock of this sudden violence.

The way the filmmakers photograph the violence in the film is one of their greatest achievements. They manage a rare thing: there is no glorification. My biggest complaint against films like Saving Private Ryan is that their claims of an anti-war stance is a lie. They use violence to sell tickets and make war seem something to be desired. For me, most war films dishonor those on the front lines by turning war into a commodity, a source of entertainment.

Children of Men may be violent, it may have deliberate parallels to current atrocities, but it never lusts after these things. The story is one that fully embraces humanity and the images that linger in my mind are not the moments of blood and gore but the images Theo’s pain filled eyes and Kee’s hopeful face. Children of Men is a story not about violence, it’s about the people that are living through it.

While I certainly wouldn’t say the film is flawless, I do think that is one of the best of the last year. There’s a beauty in its starkness and an honesty and poignancy in its story telling. It touched my heart and moved my mind. Lubezki’s cinematography is some of the best I’ve seen and Cuaron once again succeeds in making a work of art into a vision of humanity.

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday
Who could hang a name on you
When you change with every new day
Still I'm gonna miss you.