There's a road about five minutes walk from where I live in Central London. I worked there for around four years and I still walk down it most days. In the opening scene of CHILDREN OF MEN, a crumpled, aggrieved Clive Owen walks out onto that street with a cup of coffee in his hand. A bomb goes off shattering the shop front. Clive Owen ducks for cover and then continues on his journey, haltingly. Because in the London of 2027 our fears (and memories, those of us who remember the IRA) are realised: terrorist attacks are commonplace. It is a world where humans have become infertile and the youngest person alive is eighteen. Civil order has broken down around the world and Britain is the last nation still standing. Or rather crouching with its hands over its face as a fascist policeman brings down the boot.
It's amazing just how easy it is to make contemporary London on a wet November afternoon look like P.D. James dystopian future. The crumbling Victorian infrastructure, the half-light and perpetual drizzle, the uncollected rubbish and weary indifference to increasing numbers of armed rozzers. The genius of this movie is not to over-do the differences but insist on the similarities. The incidental cultural references are the same as now - the 2012 Olympics is an icon of the past not the future, but the music, dress and language are the same. When the world's youngest boy is killed, people still have lunatic outpouring of grief, Diana-stylee, and the English sense of humour is still alive and kicking. In fact, this movie, while intelligent and frightening, is also really rather funny. Reassuringly, "Britishly" funny. Now and then though, we are caught off guard by an image that is horrifying because it comes straight from our tele-visual memory. From news footage and documentaries of the Holocaust or the Bosnian war.
In a movie like CHILDREN OF MEN the key task for the film-maker is to create a world which is at once alien and believable. Director, Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki succeed by a long chalk. But the movie really works because it creates a series of memorable and believable characters thanks to some brilliant writing and top-notch performances from all the cast. The plot hinges on Clive Owen's character - Theo. He is kidnapped by his ex-wife, Julian, played by Julianne Moore, and asked to help take a miraculously pregnant woman (Claire Hope-Ashitey) out of England and to safety. In this, he is aided by two ageing hippies, played by Michael Caine and Pam Ferris - arguably their best performances on film. The supporting cast is also first class, featuring the ubiquitous Chiwetel Ejiofor as a terrorist and an intense cameo performance from an unrecognisable Charlie Hunnam (that's the blonde teen from QUEER AS FOLK to you and me.) Danny Huston is absolutely chilling as the pragmatic aesthete who sits among his art drinking fine wine while England burns. Among such an accomplished cast it is hard to single out the scene stealer, but it is probably Peter Mullan who takes the biscuit with his darkly comic portrayal of the weed-dealing bent copper, Syd.
I could go on about how superb I think this film is - visually, intellectually, comedically (of all things!) Of course, there are some quibbles. The religious imagery is laid on sporadically thick - especially with the naming of characters and one rather cloying scene near the end. But I think this is a small price to pay for a rare piece of film-making that gets the brain whirring and the pulse racing.
CHILDREN OF MEN is on release in Ireland and the UK. It opens in Japan, Belgium, France, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland in October. It opens in Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Brazil, Estonia, Chile, Croatia, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Singapore and Mexico in November. It finally rolls into Sweden and the US in December.
Where to begin with SHOOTING DOGS? Perhaps with some fundamental questions about how we expect film-makers to deal with historical subjects. My view is that artists are under no obligation to stick religiously to the truth, if there can be "a truth". I am not the kind of person to have a fit when we see Americans winning the Second World War single-handed. I am saddened that for many people movies are their only source of historical education, but hey, Hollywood is not here to compensate for shortfalls in the education system or man's reluctance to pick up a history book. Having said all this, while I do not require that a movie treats history with respect, I find it hard to take a movie seriously that claims to educate/remind/show us *what really happened* and then messes up. Think of it as consumer-oriented movie-going. I don't ask for anything more than guns and car chases, but if the director wants to go all high-brow, he sure as hell should get his facts straight.
All of which is a long lead up to my first criticism of the movie SHOOTING DOGS; it plays fast and loose with the admittedly complex history of the Rwandan genocide despite claiming to treat a serious subject with sensitivity and respect. Let me break it down: if your only knowledge of the Rwandan genocide came from watching SHOOTING DOGS you would think that the Hutus were the murderers, the Tutsis were the victims, the UN were a bunch of racist cowards and that the BBC were marvellous, gallant, brave etc. In reality, while Hutus did murder Tutsis, similarly Kagame's Tutsis murdered Hutus. The UN may have withdrawn but this was because among others, the US did not allocate any troops. And before you think I am having an anti-US moment, this was, as I understand it, partly because Kagame refused to co-operate with a UN army sent in to protect his own people! As for the role of the BBC and other journos, and the motives of the BBC in funding this piece of hackery, you can find further information here. Suffice to say that this is all complex stuff, and I am sure that I am also simplifying horribly. Then again, I have no pretensions to bring this issue to the forefront of the media.
Anyways, if we take it as read that this movie bears no more resemblance to what actually happened in Rwanda than U-571 resembles how World War Two was actually won, we are left with the following key question: Is SHOOTING DOGS any good as cinema? If you just watch it as a fictional drama, does it hold your interest? On this score, I have to give it a qualified thumbs up. First, the flaw. The movie focuses on a nice young Englishman played by pretty-boy, Hugh Dancy. Dancy is the decent everyman character through which we are meant to experience the extreme and frightening unfolding of the genocide. Over the course of the film we see his romantic optimistic nature frozen into hopeless cynicism. The problem is that Dancy's character arc is one that we have seen in many a "fish-out-of-water" movie and Dancy's limited acting talent brings nothing extra to the part. Of course, the film more than compensates by giving us the wonderful John Hurt as a world-weary priest. His character has plenty of nuance - although I am not sure the screenwriter intended that to be the case. Although he is fundamentally a morally upright individual who looks upon the massacre with horror, he is still one of those missionaries whose charity is for the convert alone. At any rate, Hurt brings the kind of weight and seeming authenticity that a film like this requires. In addition, I liked the photography very much and while I strongly believe that it is part of the "magic" of cinema that any location can be made to seem like any other with the right "bag of tricks", there was something eery in knowing that the movie was shot on location in Kigali. The combination of the great photography and John Hurt's performance sucked me into the picture, and I found myself carried away by just those simplistic emotions that the film-makers were presumably aiming for: outrage, guilt, but finally the feeling that, well, we did go see the film after all, and we felt really BAD, so that means we are okay human beings, right?? Right?
SHOOTING DOGS premiered at Toronto 2005 and is currently on release in France. It goes on limited release in the UK on March 31st. There is no reported US release date which I guess you could read something into: either US distributors think there is no market in the US for this kind of liberal, internationalist material about Africa and/or they simply think the film is no good. Answers on the back of a postcard, please....
There's a road about five minutes walk from where I live in Central London. I worked there for around four years and I still walk down it most days. In the opening scene of CHILDREN OF MEN, a crumpled, aggrieved Clive Owen walks out onto that street with a cup of coffee in his hand. A bomb goes off shattering the shop front. Clive Owen ducks for cover and then continues on his journey, haltingly. Because in the London of 2027 our fears (and memories, those of us who remember the IRA) are realised: terrorist attacks are commonplace. It is a world where humans have become infertile and the youngest person alive is eighteen. Civil order has broken down around the world and Britain is the last nation still standing. Or rather crouching with its hands over its face as a fascist policeman brings down the boot.
