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Blindness (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | March 17, 2009 15:56 | Edited March 17, 2009 15:56

“…a chilling and hyper-stylised affair.”

Based on the book by the great novelist Jose Saramago, this is a chilling and hyper-stylised affair. By turns believable, farcical and stagey, it brings to mind the earliest apocalyptic films of David Cronenberg and George A. Romero, while still emerging with a visual style all of its own.

The unsettling premise is that a man in an unnamed metropolis is suddenly and inexplicably struck blind. All the characters are unnamed too, lending a strangely allegorical Everyman quality to this already eerie scenario. One by one, many citizens fall prey to this so-called "white blindness", but the main focus is on a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore). As chaos, panic and squalor increase, the unscrupulous - notably self-styled bully boy Gael Garcia Bernal - begin to behave unspeakably. It's a very grim situation, but there are occasional hopeful "New Agey" overtones, and the central story is of the selfless struggle of the doctor's wife to help others to survive in the Lord Of The Flies-style hellhole - namely a now ramshackle hospital - in which she finds herself. She can still see normally, but pretends to be blind in order to remain with her beloved husband.

The dystopian scenario here is not entirely original, but there's a degree of novelty in the treatment and the detail. Dialogue segues from naturalistic to rhetorical, and characters slide seamlessly from black humour to actual barbaric behaviour. Then there's the "look": coloured filters abound, especially blue and white ones, and the effect is initially (and ironically) hard on the eyes.

 

Blindness is not unmissable, and has awkwardly implausible moments, but it succeeds in sucking us into its peculiar world.