Children of Men

The film starts from a simple hypothesis: for eighteen years, no child has been born. From this it draws two questions that guide everything that follows. The first concerns the meaning of what we do, and our reasons to keep going, when humanity has no future. The second concerns what we allow ourselves to do to people in the name of a cause, even the cause of the future.

First question: if no one is to come after us, does what we do still have meaning, and why keep going? The film shows it first through its setting: no apocalyptic landscape, but filthy streets, refugees held in cages, state advertisements for a suicide kit called Quietus. The philosopher Samuel Scheffler starts from the same hypothesis, borrowed from P. D. James's novel, to make a surprising claim: much of what matters to us (inquiring, building, handing things on) assumes, without our knowing it, that others will live after us. Take away this survival of humanity, which Scheffler calls the collective afterlife, and we would lose the heart to devote ourselves to those activities, even if our own lives were not shortened by a single day. Hannah Arendt says something different but points the same way: because we are born, we can begin something new; this is natality. In the film's world, where no one is born any more, this capacity to begin seems to die out in the living too.

One scene shows what becomes of this idea among those who govern. Theo, the character the film follows, visits his cousin Nigel, a government minister. Nigel has sheltered Picasso's Guernica and Michelangelo's David in an "Ark of the Arts". Theo asks him what keeps him going; Nigel answers that he simply doesn't think about it. Noah's ark saved living creatures for the world to come; this one saves artworks for a world to come that Nigel would rather not wonder about. He preserves without asking for whom. Theo expects nothing anymore: a former activist, he tells a friend that even if a cure were found, it would be too late.

Yet when his ex-wife Julian, who leads an underground group defending refugees, the Fishes, asks him to help a young refugee, Kee, leave the country, he agrees, for money. Then he keeps going, step after step, far beyond what he had promised. The film gives him neither speech nor conversion: it follows him closely, with a handheld camera, and lets us see that he acts like someone who hopes, without ever saying so. The film's first answer: one can keep acting without believing in the future. But Kee matters to others than Theo: she soon finds herself caught between opposing camps.

Second question: can one serve a cause by using people? The film first raises it through the state. To keep order in a country that believes itself the last one standing, the regime reduces refugees to a security problem: they are locked up, sorted, deported. Theo himself starts by treating Kee as a paid job. Kant gave the rule: never treat a person merely as a means, even for a just end (one of the formulas of the categorical imperative). The word "merely" matters: being paid to help someone does not rule out helping them for their own sake, and that is what Theo discovers along the way. Against those who calculate, such as Syd, a corrupt policeman who charges for every favor, the film sets characters who protect without calculating: Jasper, an old friend of Theo's hidden in the woods, Miriam, who accompanies Kee, and Marichka, a refugee who opens her door to Theo and Kee.

The film puts the second question in its most brutal form: violence. To use force for a cause is to accept that people will pay the price. The state's violence is plain: cages in the streets, round-ups, camps where detainees are beaten and hooded, in images that recall Abu Ghraib. Against it, the Fishes have taken up arms: the state treats them as terrorists; they call themselves the refugees' defenders. Their reasoning recalls Frantz Fanon's: when the order itself is violence, counter-violence can seem the only answer. Hans Jonas, by contrast, warned against hope turned into a program: he reproached the utopia of the philosopher Ernst Bloch for being ready to sacrifice the living to the world it promises. The film does not condemn the Fishes' fight against oppression, but it refuses to make their violence glorious: the fighting is shot in long, almost continuous takes, the camera glued to Theo, with no overview and no heroes. What we mostly see is what war costs those caught in the middle.

The two questions meet in what people do. Nigel preserves without asking for whom; Theo, who expects nothing anymore, nevertheless takes Kee far beyond what his bargain required. Around them, the state files refugees under security risks, Syd charges for his favors, the Fishes take up arms; Jasper, Miriam and Marichka protect without counting the cost. Hence the question that runs through the film: must one believe in a future in order to act, and can one serve it without sacrificing the living to it?