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Blindness review
:. Director: Fernando Meirelles
:. Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo
:. Running Time: 1:58
:. Year: 2008
:. Country: USA
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At the opening of the film, Danny Glover's voice takes the audience hostage: "I don't think we went blind. I think we were always blind."
The premise of Blindness, adapted by Don McKellar from Nobel Prize winning author José Sarámago's novel and directed by Fernando Meirelles is this: an epidemic of blindness is spreading across the world. The contaminated find themselves quarantined in an abandoned hospital. Soon fending for themselves, they try to reorganize a society with new hierarchical rules and where barbarism comes face to face with human dignity. Among them, a woman untouched by evil, leading a handful of survivors to revolt and salvation.
From the beginning of the film, Fernando Meirelles speeds the viewer along, not allowing a second for rest. His frenetic editing of the film takes it to the edge of action movies until the middle of the film in a place of confinement where the victims of the plague will succumb to their instincts for survival after a series of sequences showing the spread of evil striking at random.
If the idea of blindness is represented by a framework invaded by white, where everything is still to be invented, it is reduced to a stylistic gimmick, amidst vague and abstract images appearing as the loss of points of reference and structure in a world where freedom of movement becomes the nightmare of the blind. Meirelles seems to constantly face the bottom of the impasse of adaptation, doesn't trust his plans that could speak for themselves. Result: brilliant ideas destroyed by a didacticism too supported and fully served by an unbearable voiceover, residue left over from the novel.
The director is never able to find a fair balance between the codes of a film genre that could have flirted with I am Legend and other films claiming to represent the universe of zombies, and the moralizing discourse on the fragility of society which, once freed itself, falls into chaos and Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Constantly perched on a wire, the film stumbles from one part to another (once out of prison, the characters find themselves once again fending for themselves outside, under new chaos) moving from one environment to another without negotiating the transition. Its various segments explore ideas contained in the novel itself and try to resonate with contemporary issues, claiming to raise questions delivering answers. Unfortunately, one gets the impression that Meirelles himself is content with preaching to the converted.
In the end, Blindness is a film that questions its own making, its direction being too emphasized to let the film express itself, as if this virgin screen aroused for the director the same anxiety as a blank page for a novelist. A failure.
Moland Fengkov
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
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