Imagine cities ravaged, not by war, crime or natural disaster, but by lack of sight.
Blindness, based on the book of the same title by Jos?(c) Saramago, depicts a city slowly overcome by a mysterious illness that causes people to suddenly lose their eyesight.
Instead of seeing darkness, the victims experience a white, milky blur over their eyes. The film moves along as blindness spreads, observing the first victim in full and several victims afterward.
As with most every dystopian disaster, the blindness creates panic amongst the public, and chaos ensues. Before the illness becomes pandemic, its first victims are quarantined in a dilapidated mental hospital with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Heavily guarded, no one is allowed to leave or even request help from the army surrounding the hospital. The army, like everyone else, is petrified; they are so afraid of the victims that they throw them shovels to bury the dead. It's the equivalent of a modern plague.
What ensues is an adult version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The "good" victims have to battle the evil, criminal victims in the hospital - the Third Ward and its self-appointed "king," played by Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel). The Third Ward controls the food distribution and ransoms packages of food and supplies.
As the situation becomes desperate, the main character of the story, played by Julianne Moore (I'm Not There), uses her best asset to help the others: her eyesight. She has remained unaffected but has pretended to be blind to stay with her eye doctor husband, played by Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac).
Whether this film is good or not is beside the point. Blindness belongs to the recent queue of film allegories such as Children of Men and Babel.
The film contains the same existential portrayal of the human condition, accenting both its goodness and barbarity.
Saramago's novel, and the adapted screenplay by Don McKellar (Childstar), is drenched in these themes, quite pessimistic about humans confronted with difficult circumstances.
Horrible things are bound to happen when people are isolated and starving. The film captures that desperation and with it observes the loss of identity that comes with it. This observation is accented by the lack of proper names for any of the characters.
The director, Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener), uses bleak imagery to convey his message; the color is drained and meant to emphasize black and white. Much of the movie is filmed with what appears to be a handheld camera, giving many close-ups and stock footage of disasters.
This decision by Meirelles proves effective; some of the conditions are so bleak viewers won't be able to imagine them in full color, and the darkness is prevalent in some of the more disturbing scenes.
The hospital and soulless city are microcosms of the world. Meirelles has experience with filming destructive societies (see City of God) and his talent comes full circle in Blindness.
Throughout the film, however, the good people may degrade themselves to survive, but refuse to lose their humanity.
Meirelles and McKellar use Saramago's words to visually express that people are either born good or evil, and it takes a desperate situation for them to show their true colors.
People will abuse others to get what they want: civilization comes after the storm. And, to convey this properly, the film never ventures out of the realm of realism, no matter how ridiculous the situation.
One can't say the film is good or bad, as much as it is real. Blindness reminds viewers of the power we have in how we treat others.
Photo: Breadchastick / Wikimedia Commons
