The blind leading the blind. (Blindness (DVD))

Member Name: FairyG

Product:	Blindness (DVD)
Date:	09/05/09 (101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting direction that makes you think about the senses.

Disadvantages: Slow to develop.

Blindness is a weird low budget film about a whole unnamed city of people who rapidly go blind one after another, being able to see only whiteness, like swimming in milk. It begins with one man and spreads like a virus, mystifying the doctor who first encounters it (Mark Ruffalo).

Soon everyone who comes into contact with a victim becomes affected, including the doctor, but surprisingly not his wife (Julianne Moore). Characters don't have names in this film, so I'll just refer to them as the doctor etc.

The doctor is sent into quarantine in an abandoned mental asylum, and his wife pretends to be blind as well in order to go with him and take care of him. It's an ugly concrete building with basic facilities and no one to take care of the blind people. Food is passed in by armed guards, but other than that they are left to their own devices. The doctor's wife begins to take care of the first few people that arrive along with them, forming a family group that she protects as well as she can, whilst not revealing to anyone except her husband that she can see. She soon realises it would put her at risk, as everyone would then be demanding help from her.

However the quarantine facility becomes increasingly overcrowded and that's when more terrifying problems start to arise. Left to police themselves, the groups in each unit have vastly different ideas on how to organize themselves and share out food. It's up to the doctor's wife to help her new family group break out of the asylum and find a safer place. But what will they find outside?

It's a slow moving film, that examines the good as well as the most depraved aspects of human nature. Some scenes are very disturbing, but not always in a visual way. The emphasis is on the other senses, so some scenes are glimpsed in the shadowy darkness of unlit buildings, and it's mostly the sounds that tell us what is actually happening. A rape scene becomes all the more shocking because of what we hear happening and what is being said. The rest is left to the imagination.

Other scenes are shown in glaring milky whiteness, emphasizing that this is all the characters can see. Sometimes the camera focuses on sparkling water fizzing in the glass, people washing in the rain and luxuriating in clean water on their skin, or on someone taking a ravenous bite from a sausage, so we are directed to think of the senses of sound, smell, taste and touch.

Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo both put in touching, emotional performances as the couple whose relationship changes as the dynamics of power within the relationship changes.

It's a strange premise for a film - no explanation is offered for the blindness epidemic, although there is speculation that it's some kind of virus. That's not what the story is about. It's about how people would react if that most essential of senses is removed, and it brutally explores many of the possibilities with close attention to detail. Everyone is reduced to the same helpless level, but inevitably there would be those who would find a way to dominate and take what they need for themselves. The disturbing, and quite believable thing, is the portrayal of how fast and how utterly our society would break down.

For instance, some people walk around naked, and once I thought about it I realised that if you took your clothes off to wash and someone stole them, or you couldn't find them, you'd have to walk around naked until you found some more. The ground becomes more and more littered, because people can't be bothered to search out a bin, or maybe because the bins are all full, and then people are slipping on the rubbish.

It would be hard to say I particularly enjoyed this film, although I found it fascinating to see how things would develop and I wanted to know how it would end. There's a sense of rawness to it, much like 28 Days Later, but with less action and suspense. It's a disturbing and thought-provoking film about human fragility, but lacks the impact and excitement of 28 Days later.

Blindness is based on a 1995 novel by Jose Saramago, winner of the Portugese Nobel Prize for Literature.

Director: Fernando Meirelles (Director of The Constant Gardener)
Running time: 117 minutes

Summary: Thought provoking.