No Men Beyond This Point

Men are obsolete. In the 1950s women start to get pregnant on their own, and give birth only to girls. The world doesn't need men anymore. This isn't the only bad news for males. An uptight, extreme and conservative female coalition is in power, and payback is harsh. The few remaining men are locked up in "sanctuaries" and darted with tranquilizers if they dare to leave. Their food is laced with estrogen to keep them docile. Menstral cycles are synchronized and the world becomes one big sorority house. At 37 years old Andrew is the youngest man in the world. He is a fluke and anomaly, born when women are giving birth solely to girls. He has a permit to leave the sanctuary and live as a domestic worker with the family of Terra and Iris. When Iris starts a relationship with Andrew, the two create a media firestorm. As with Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver's Travels and other satires, this alternative history and mockumentary helps us step outside of ourselves and see the world from a different perspective.

It is enlightening as well as hilarious, and slightly scary and unsettling, to imagine this role reversal. Who would have thought a professor of men's history would ever be needed?! While the film is limited in terms of depth, funding and acting, I thoroughly enjoyed the out-of-the-box thinking and puns about human nature. It is good that this is just a fantasy (and yet I know a few women who would like this world to happen, at least for men who don't instantly agree with them). Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival 2015.

Decided to write this review because of another review where the reviewer obviously did not understand the concept of a mockumentary. This is the Turkey, the dressing, gravy and mash potatoes! The complete saga of another reality where men become obsolete; that's the mcguffin. The real story is what the women of the world make of that, and the men too. Told in the manner of documentaries that go back and forth, present day and past, as the info is needed, the story does build and the ending isn't predictable. The acting is great - everyone - which means the writer/director did a great job. There are so many scenes so well done it was an absolute pleasure to watch and laugh along with everyone else in the audience when we recognized ourselves and the things we do. But we also recognize the foibles of our generation, the previous ones, and many of the decisions made for stupid reasons. How women were/are treated, aboriginals, bears wandering into cities and, of course, Australians.

First of all, let me say I get the feeling that a lot of people will be enamored by this movie, or more precisely, feel pressed into treating it with a sort of reverence for what it is, a fake documentary centered around a pseudo controversial, pseudo thought- provoking subject: the extinction of man, being presented in as kosher and superficial a way as possible. By the same token, this is precisely why it left such a dry taste in my mouth, because it just doesn't go beyond being a documentary about a fake subject, crafted to be as close of a simulacrum to real life as possible, with a little bit of comic irony thrown in, in the attempt to give the audience at least SOMETHING tangible to come away with.

The problem is, it's not enough to make the film stand out. For one, the jokes just aren't clever or funny enough for this film to be appreciated as a comedy, in my opinion. The humour is very much in the vein of "chuckle chuckle" university hall type humour, and the entire film basically has one running joke going for it: male stereotypes that have already been done to death, combined with the situational irony of straight white males being presented as an oppressed class.

In that regard, it's very clear to see that the filmmakers were quite stealthily trying to walk the line between coming across as either feminist leaning, or anti-feminist. Contrary to what some commenters are saying, I think they largely succeeded to that effect, and I'm saying that as someone who tends to have a very strong repulsion to anything that comes across as preachy gender bias. Some commenters were annoyed that the film focused so much on men's needs, desires, and feelings, whereas others were, I guess riled up by the male stereotyping. One way or another, if you have trouble appreciating a light-hearted film for what it is, your own biases may very easily show, because that's what this is, a film that puts forth incredibly superficial and innocuous ideas, which isn't meant to be taken too seriously, as a result.

Indeed, this is lukewarm stuff that's not going to land or resonate with people in ANY meaningful way, and instead will have people arguing back and forth over whether or not it was taking a light jab (very light) at either gender (realistically it does so to both). It's not a thought provoking film in the slightest. It doesn't deal with the idea of gender as a social construct whatsoever, and somewhat surprisingly, it barely even scrapes the surface of the most obvious thing, the gay/straight issue, not to mention barely scraping the surface on how gender roles in society play out. Women achieve world peace and environmental causes. That's as deep as it gets. Do women really make worse engineers, and would certain male dominated fields like that end up disintegrating? This film wasn't about to touch those kinds of topics with a 10 foot pole, with good reason, to some extent.

Ultimately, being thought-provoking is at the very end of the list of things that this film could have done to make itself resonate more. Worst of all, is it's a very ineffective character study. We really don't get to see the nitty-gritty of our male protagonist's daily life, because the film instead spends so much time building up the history behind this manless alternate universe that they've created, which I found impossible to get interested in. Simply put, the society is not strange enough or dire enough to be spellbinding the way stories like "1984" are. If the film was focused as more of a "day in the life of" style documentary, while leaving out the long boring history lesson, it would have been infinitely better. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen an ACTUAL documentary that attempts to do both in one movie, the way this film does. The film lacks focus, and really, that's what kills it.

All the while watching this, I just kept thinking to myself "This is stupid." or "Who cares?" because I could not in any way connect with, or emotionally invest into the characters on screen. No offence to anyone who actually liked this, but to me it was a film almost completely without purpose. They successfully created a very realistic-seeming fake documentary about the near extinction of the male species... So what?

It is fascinating to me how such a simple film became so controversial. It took a pretty basic concept (some would say a rip-off of Children of Men) and blasted onto the scene as a simple yet intriguing mockumentary on gender relations.

If this had come out ten or fifteen years ago, there wouldn't have been anywhere near the controversy. But, maybe that's what the film was going for. It meant to stir up discussion. If that was it was going for, I imagine the film was trying to say that both men and women are important in society.

But, what's great in this film is that is has so many layers. Could it be a parable for homosexuals? Is it a cautionary tale? Is it meant to put men down? Or perhaps it's meant to proliferate gender stereotypes? Maybe it's just a simple comedy? If any one of these were true, this film might not be so special, but seeing as all these elements combine, this film is very profound.

Considering it's a fake documentary-style movie, it's somewhat fun.