Cannes 2008: Blindness review

Last Updated: 2:01pm BST 14/05/2008

*Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Blindness at the Cannes film festival
*

The 61st Cannes festival began with a bang. Followed by horns, then
yelling, then chaos.

Blindness, directed by Fernando Meireilles from a novel by Portuguese
Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, is set in an unnamed city whose
inhabitants are suddenly plagued by a 'white blindness' that leaves them
hysterically flailing and crashing across streets newly alien to them.

They're hustled into an asylum in which there's no attempt at
rehabilitation and whose inmates risk being shot if they try to break
out. The only source of hope lies in an unnamed character played by
Julianne Moore: she pretended to be blind so that she wouldn't be
separated from her optician husband (Mark Ruffalo).

The film, scripted by Don McKellar who directed the excellent
pre-millenial story Last Night, seems at first to be another apocalypse
drama in the vein of Children of Men and I Am Legend.

But, largely at the behest of Saramago who vetoed adaptations that
dwelled too much on violence or neo-zombie head-ripping, it goes to
great lengths to emphasise the philosophical and spiritual implications
of the contagion.

Too much so on occasion: during a conversation about agnosticism over
supper, Ruffalo uses the unforgivable words "etymologically speaking" to
Moore. Elsewhere, Danny Glover's voice over keeps spelling out questions
that the audience is already asking itself.

Blindness recalls late-60s films such a Robert Downey Sr's Pound in
which a cross-section of characters is penned together with cruel and
sometimes comic results. These are laboratory dramas in which the
ability of human beings to organize themselves for the common good is
tested - often with bleak results.

Here, a state of near-savagery soon emerges, with Gael Garcia Bernal
playing a pistol-waving demagogue who forces female inmates to offer
their bodies in return for food. One of his most effective sidekicks is
a softly-spoken brute who was born unsighted: in the kingdom of the
blind, the long-term blind are kings.

Blindness is one of a clutch of recent films, last year's
Cannes-heralded The Diving Bell and The Butterfly among them, that tries
to envisage the world from the perspective of the unsighted. At times,
there is jagged, panicky movement; at others, the screen is filled with
drifting, abstract patterns.

The cinematography alternates between bleached out wooziness and
super-sharp pointillism. These moves, as well as the awkward sound
design and the camera's shifting point of view, are overdone.

As always, it's impossible to take one's eyes off Moore who is so adept
at playing roles in which her strength seems brittle, almost
masochistic. Alice Braga, a prostitute who is one of the inmates that
Moore and Ruffalo befriend, is also a stand-out performer.

They do well to save a film that, in trying so hard to be faithful to
the novel, falls prey to tone-deafness.




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