In an attempt to dissect a single part of Children of Men, I have chosen the
following portion of the exotic picture, one which I feel was a beautiful
portrayal of the work as a whole.
While the three characters seek refuge
at Merlin… I mean Jasper’s home, a beautiful scene unfolds before our eyes.
Theo returns from the woods surrounding the home, and it is a dark but pleasant
night. The camera follows Theo into the home, and the movement stops just as
Theo does – perfectly, the screen is split down the middle, half of the camera covers
Theo and his dimmed surroundings, while the other half displays the brightly
lit, but distant, room occupied by the other characters.
Jasper begins, introducing us to the topic
at hand – “everything is a mythic, cosmic battle between faith and chance.” We
begin pondering about what this could mean about our own lives and those of our
forebears. Immediately, we are directed to relate this topic to Yin and Yang,
Shiva and Shakti, and Lennon and McCartney. These examples are nothing but intentional.
They portray history; they allow our minds to wander to ancient Chinese and
Hindu philosophies—both are ideas of opposites that cannot exist without one
another. The legends John Lennon and Paul McCartney are renowned British
artists that will forever remain a part of British history. Similarly, Hindu
mantras and Spanish dialect are prevalent throughout the film. This could be a
display of Britain’s historical imperialistic regime and how its foreign conquests have remained a part of it.
All the while of discussion, Theo is the
focus of the camera. The deep-space composition of the camera disposition portrays
a closer, larger, and clearer image of Theo and his expressions. We see the
clear chuckle formed on Theo’s face when Miriam recognizes the taste of
“strawberries” in her trial of Jasper’s prized recreations – but, very
ironically, we cannot see Miriam’s expression herself. The director pulls our
focus towards Theo’s visual elements and expressions, while, oddly, all of the
dialogue is coming from the blurred room that we can barely discern. Through
this scene, Cuarón utilizes the depth of his field and unbalanced lighting to obviously
direct our eyes towards one character, while our ears are focused on the sounds
and words coming from the room that is distant to our vision. Theo is merely
supposed to be a passive observer in this course of dialogue, but he so
beautifully becomes the main character in this scene.
The conversation directs itself to the
history of Theo’s own life – how both fate and chance played a role in his
past. Through chance and faith, he was fortunate to meet Julian and
simultaneously ill-fated to lose his “little dream,” Dylan, to the awful flu.
At this moment, we are focused on Theo’s
sudden turn of the face, and all we see is the despair in Theo’s eyes at the
sound of his long-lost child’s name. This history that we are only hearing
through a source, was a concrete experience that Theo himself had to live
through. Cuarón artistically makes Theo’s expressions the center of this scene;
by doing so, he seems to want us to realize that this was Theo’s memory. At the
heart of every past condition have been the actual individuals who were forced
with the complex dilemmas of choice, chance, and faith – the circumstances that
formed their histories.
This scene spoke to me beyond what I
could hear. It reminded me that history, at its very root, deals with the basic
human-human interaction. At the very center of history, culture, and tradition
are the conversations had, the thoughts formed, and the decisions made by
individuals of the past. As the cost of numerous lives allows Key to create a better history for those of
the future, so it becomes the responsibility of the current population to work
with whatever is in our bounds to create a “tomorrow” that we can be proud of, leaving the rest to faith and chance –
things beyond our control.
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