Children of Men (film)

Children of Men is a 2006 film directed by Alfonso Cuarón, based on the 1992 novel by P.D. James.

Film notes:

• gender (sigh): it's the women who are infertile
• gender (sigh): when Theo walks into the office and everyone is watching the story about the death of the youngest man alive, there is a long pan over cubicle after cubicle of women weeping, staring at the screen; one woman has many little cute tschotchkes which i suppose we're to take as a sign of how women have been so destroyed by not being able to be mothers; why this row of cubicles is all women? men shown watching are stoic & passive; women are emotive.
• gender (sigh): characterization - The story is all about Theo; women are ineffective, objects of action, crazy, or killed. Julian is an active & vibrant character; she's killed relatively early in the film. Otherwise female characters are plot points: things that move the action along helpfully, or are the subject of the action. Kee is given almost no characterization: a labor scene, she loves her baby, and one or maybe two brief moments of personalization. Miriam the midwife is "earnest" and loony and self-sacrificial; Marichka is crazy and self-sacrificial. Another woman who apparently in the past was awesome is now catatonic. The central villains are male -- dreadlocked violent guy & Luke & Syd. Central help is provided by fun self-sacrificial hippy guy. Cousin who gets the papers, Nigel, also male.
• clearly hauling out the ghosts of concentration camps past and present -- Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo -- and confronting anti-immigrant sentiment around; film takes place in England but read it in the US: a film by a Mexican director pointing out the inhumanity and horror of anti-immigrant sentiment by a rich mostly white country.
• profoundly cynical & depressing - the state is thoroughly evil, but so is collective human action of any sort -- activism is dead and villainous: Theo gave it up; Julian was killed by comrades. hope is inexplicable -- the loss of children was mysterious, so is the recovery with one pregnancy. heroism is equivalent to self-sacrifice, and is left only for a few good souls -- and you never know who to trust because you can be betrayed (Luke, Syd)
• great beauty in the film - the scene of the infant crying & the walk down the stairs; the devastation in the apartment building as it is being bombarded; the woman holding her child (pietá); lots of visual cues to famous works of art and catholic iconography - pietá, mary/joseph/baby jesus, etc.