Blindness Fernando Meirelles USA/Brazil 2008
After an epidemic of blindness breaks out in an anonymous North American city, everyone who has contracted the disease is quarantined in an abandoned hospital and left to rot. So the scene is set for the film called simply Blindness.
The film transcends the achievements of, say, Peter Shaffer's black comedy where a bunch of actors show off while stumbling around on a well-lit stage. Here, the common affliction brings the newly blind together in a reflection of the society outside.
All billeted in Ward One, the various characters become acquainted. The wife of a doctor (played by Julianne Moore), who pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband, takes the lead. Horrendously, she alone witnesses the anarchy that follows as the afflicted fail to cope. In one calmly depressing montage Moore's character is wearily seen trying to mop up after a horde of disorientated people who don't even know where the toilets are. Chaos ensues.
Based on the novel by José Saramago, Blindness deftly avoids the disaster movie route reyling instead on human drama. Watching the world falling apart comes over as just as harrowing, and the story unfolds almost as a fable where some imperceptible lesson is delivered to an uncomprehending world. Even the blindness itself is almost hopeful: vision fades to white not black.
Along similar lines to the Lars von Trier film, Dogville, a minimalist tale of refuge in a small town, we see the world in microcosm in the guise of the hospital. Just as opportunism erodes society, the same undercurrents flow in the hospital. When, authorities fail to prevent the disease ravaging the world outside, the blind people in the hospital run short of food and fight over it, revealing the worst aspects of human nature. Ward Three seizes the food to extort first money and jewellery; then women from everyone else. And it gets worse. Much worse.
But unlike many apocalyptic dramas, Blindness doesn't abandon its characters to their fate. The positives of coping with losing one's sight in a group stand out. Senses other than sight become more important. When one character brings a radio into the hospital everybody in Ward One is momentarily untied by a song on the radio. Later everybody takes primal delight in the rain. This is something they can actually feel. And their sheer joy is quite something to behold.
Undeniably, Blindness is an actors' showcase from the well-regarded Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, of City of God fame, and lots of well-known talent, such as Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael Garcia Bernal, all get the opportunity to act their socks off. Pretty much anybody would look good in this film. Yet Blindness invigorates the tired end-of-the-world genre of films with a bracing human spirit.
