Alfonso Cuarón
I Figli Degli Uomini

When dystopia is powerful, the Pink Floyd pig floats in the sky. Men do not have children, they no longer hope, the chatter of children does not stir the still days.

I revisited this 2006 film and saw much of the later Cuarón in it, perhaps with a bit less awareness of his capabilities. A heterogeneous style, juxtaposing extraordinary sequences with dull passages, mere narrative connections.

It begins a bit grumpy like Clive Owen, who doesn’t even try to be pleasant. A passive-aggressive apathy in a world that’s falling apart, yet no one paints a dramatic fresco of it. The dystopia is everywhere, but mostly within man, in his increasingly faint desire and need to move forward. In this, I believe it is one of the least explained films of its genre. And it benefits from it, because the horrors of tomorrow are today’s anxieties taken to the extreme. And looking at the refugees in cages, we see nothing but the news chronicles.

The decline of human fertility is not so different from the deliberate birthrate plunge of recent years. Mostly a moral dystopia, a disenchantment that corrupts everything. It ends in guerrilla warfare, art no longer matters, the world sinks.

Midway, the film becomes a travel poem, an endless sequence shot accompanying man's descent into hell. And the ascent, on a little boat in the blue. Here, the awareness of Cuarón's expressive power becomes clear. It's not so much the plot, the story, it's the vision.

As will later happen in Roma, with an even greater clarity, the filmmaker goes on to capture the immanent forces that stir man. Social rage, perpetual war, and the fragile force of life that finds a way. It finds the comfort of a gypsy who accompanies it, gathers the silence of guns at its passage (but only for those few moments), and feeds on the immense effort of many to ensure its survival.

In a perspective reversal that illustrates all of human perversion, the gestation and birth of a child become the supreme epic, an endless odyssey, a sacrifice of many. While the world flounders carefully in the process of self-destruction, the palingenesis is a child delivered on a filthy mattress in a ravaged city. Worse, the world thinks only of how to exploit that rebirth. How to make political use of it.

There are many beautiful camera movements, especially in the long sequence that accompanies our protagonists in the difficult final approach. But they are functional technicalities; the soul of the film lies elsewhere, in the underlying sentiment, not in the showy directorial prowess for its own sake.

Cuarón's skill finds here an epiphanic moment, but in his subsequent works, it will be even higher and always functional to a vision of humanity. There is a very strong link between this and Roma, almost a parallel sequence that I won't spoil for you. And it indicates a compositional finesse that has grown significantly over the years. Watching Children of Men, I understood more of the perfection of Roma.