Dir: Fernando Meirelles
Featuring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael García Bernal
What would the end of the world look like? Or would it be so tragic you couldn’t even stand to watch? In his third feature, “Blindness,” director Fernando Meirelles focuses his camera on a world gone blind to tell a story of humanity collapsing in on itself. The film was created by the same director, producer, cinematographer and editor team that sharpened their creative teeth on more than 600 South American television commercials before making hefty features “City of God” and “The Constant Gardner.” “Blindness” lives up to its heritage of significant cinematic storytelling as it paints a tale of humiliation, misunderstanding and both the glorious highs and sordid lows of human nature.
Based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago, “Blindness” tells the story of “the white sickness”, an epidemic of milky blindness that descends on humanity suddenly and without explanation. We follow a group of the initially infected, as well as a woman claiming she is blind in order to remain with her husband (Julianne Moore), into an abandoned asylum where they are quarantined. In a Golding-esque descent, the quarantined, having lost sight, lose their humanity with a fierce suddenness as the filmmakers present a civilization regressed into feudal warfare and grotesque sexual bartering. Society crumbles as more and more individuals go blind in the murky pandemic, and eventually only Moore’s character retains her sight. Escaping the asylum after literally no one is left to “keep an eye” on it, she is forced to lead a group of the first people to be infected out into the decayed world in an attempt to redeem themselves from the ghastly sickness.
Shot in Canada, Brazil and Uruguay, the film has a purposefully vague sense of location. In the initial stages of the film’s production, Saramago insisted the film not be shot in any recognizable city so as to enlarge the scope of the story and put all of mankind in front of the lens. Cinematographer César Charlone shoots the film in a powerfully emotive style. Overlaying MiniDV footage with confused and obscuring thin layers of white paint and milk, he offers a beautiful and frighteningly effective interpretation of the “sea of milk,” as the sickness in the novel is described. When viewed alongside the crisp 35mm and Super 16mm footage used by Charlone in other portions of the film, these sequences come across as jarring and evocative. Interestingly, the filmmakers have asked for the film to be projected digitally where possible in an attempt to preserve the intense whiteness in these shots.
While powerful and cautionary, the film doesn’t quite realize its obvious goals. Trying to present a world completely without morality and hope, the film fails to show the real humanity of its characters that would be required for the audience to sympathize with them. Unable to fully care for its characters, the film plays more like a hazy fable than a literate critique, and suffers for it.
However, the film is thoughtful, masterfully made and should be seen by anyone interested in frighteningly realistic doomsday scenarios, images of a society gone mad, or thinly veiled allusions to the state of prisons and torture in the world today.
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