A bunch of children attend a rural English school and all is seemingly normal. There’s even a date to tell us we’re in the “real” world: 1978. Sure, there aren’t any male teachers, but that generally doesn’t apply to schools for young children anymore. Non-paedophile males generally don’t want to work with those ages, especially not at those salaries.
Director Mark Romanek makes a point of dwelling on the exquisite innocence of these children as they sing a hymn. It’s all so very English. Their principal is the still-divine Charlotte Rampling, but many of us cannot help remember her playing a woman who becomes turned on by her Nazi torturer conducting various “scientific” experiments on her in The Night Porter.
Children from Hailsham are special, she says. And we see how special they are by the fact that they wear electronic bracelets on their wrists. They are being monitored. Why? It takes a feeling teacher, played by the ever-impressive Sally Hawkins, to tell them that they will become organ donors. They will not lead normal lives. They will make two or three donations and then they will complete, the most terribly ironic euphemism for dying. They will die young.
The problem is they don’t understand. They see this as normal. But it’s a moot point that they are so brainwashed that they do not rebel against this unnatural order of things, especially later when Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) start having sex. Surely they would want this to continue? Surely they would look around them and see that others have children. Surely they would want children later on, whether with each other or not? Surely they would want to know where their parents are?
Granted, it transpires later on that they come from the dregs of society. They are the unwanted children of junkies and prostitutes, but that wouldn’t necessarily put them off wanting children of their own. Some people desperately want to create what they did not have. There is no indication that any kind of enforcement takes place.
There are small uprisings. Tommy, for example, has a natural temper. He also happens to be a good artist, one of the few times that someone’s art on screen comes across as uniquely theirs.
Sure, they are kept in the country and in country houses, but they still have access to TV and porn magazines. They see other people getting old. It’s not like the whole world is like this. Surely this should lead at least one of them to want to go into the bigger, wider, outside world? Would their loyalty to each other be so strong that they’ll stick together, regardless? Can social brainwashing be so powerful? Perhaps.
But maybe it doesn’t matter, for if this film is not that successful a description of an alternative universe or dystopia then it is a strikingly original and painfully truthful metaphor for this one, English and beyond.
The three main characters’ innocence as adults is as shattering as seeing your own parent being unable to understand that they’ve just been given a death sentence by a neurologist. Tommy, Kathy and Ruth don’t know, for example, how to order food at a takeaway restaurant. And they are human enough to betray each other, as is so often the case in romantic triangles.
The photography and performances are all extremely fine, and I take back anything I ever said or thought about Knightley as an actress. Her post-operative speech, limping down a hospital corridor with the friend she betrayed, is a masterpiece of physical and existential shame.
It may all sound depressing, but seeing these beautiful young people going wide-eyed to their ends forces us to ask ourselves whether we are complete, now, and whether we will be the day we do just that: “complete”.
Neil Sonnekus
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