Last night I went to see one of the most talked about films of the year here in Brazil (and probably outside as well), Fernando Meirelles' 'Blindness'. After the success of 'City of God' and 'The Constant Gardener', everyone was anxious to find out what the award-winning director would make of Nobel Prize-Winner José Saramago's novel. Also interesting is that Meirelles decided to employ American actors for this film such as Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, perhaps in an attempt to reach out to a bigger market, namely the USA; however he still maintained its distance from Hollywood since it was an international co-production between Canada, Japan, and Brazil.
The story is about a city (never made specific) where, one day, there is a sudden outbreak of a disease turning people blind (dubbed "the white sickness"). It's not blindness in the ordinary sense since rather than seeing pitch black, they see only white. The government quickly rounds up the individuals they believe are infected and puts them in quarantine. Among these is a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore); somehow, she is immune to the disease and is only person that can still see, unbeknownst to all apart from her husband. Soon, the numbers in the quarantined area begin to grow and grow and with no one take care of them but themselves, they have to learn to survive together somehow.
I have mixed feelings about this film, which is probably a good thing since it will spark debate among my peers. First off, I haven't read the book yet, so my opinion is based solely on the film itself. Technically, the film is brilliant: the expressive use of framing, the whiteness of the image, the movement of camera, they all work together to provide the film with its own visually strong cinematic language. Meirelles commented on how one of the principles during production was to imagine that a blind person was holding the camera, not aware of over exposure, moving it erratically, to give the audience a sense of what it is like to be blind. And in this I feel Meirelles does succeed, but it is exactly this that I feel interrupts the film so much. He concentrates so hard on relating to us these sensations that at times they take priority over the story: it becomes an exercise in showing us what it's like to be blind rather than a story about people who have suddenly become blind. This doesn't persist throughout the whole film, but it was enough to distract me from the narrative.
This distraction is what made it hard me to relate to some of the characters. As the beginning of the film already throws you into this visual style before even having really introduced the characters, it makes the intial scenes seems very juttery and disjointed. I found it became hard to sympathise with these characters, especially the Wife, and being the only person who can see and thus the one you can relate to most, I found I wasn't sucked in by the film. In fact it was only much later in the film when Gael García Bernal's character enters the story that I felt much more involved. As the leader of one of the other wards, he quickly establishes himself as a tyrant in the quarantine area and breeds hatred in the audience, a testament to the strength of Bernal's acting I believe. In identifying Bernal as the villain, it then became much easier to relate to and sympathise with Moore as the heroine. I just wish it hadn't taken two-thirds of the film for that to happen.
At the end of the day, this is a story about the absence of sight presented to us through a medium based entirely on vision. It was inevitable that there were going to be some problems from the get go. But all-in-all, from a cynical and rather pessimistic point of view, it could've been much worse.
