Blindness
2008
**½
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Cast: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover, Yoshino Kimura, Alice Braga, Don McKellar, Sandra Oh
A mysterious infection turns people blind in a blink of an eye. One woman is not affected, but she joins her husband in government quarantine. The infection, which initially seems like a contagious hysteria, first corrupts this microcosm of the society and eventually brings down the entire civilisation. This set-up is intriguing and rife with possibilities, but as soon as the self-appointed leader of Ward 3 pulls out a gun, things go downhill. As the events in the isolation unit turn increasingly lurid, the big themes of the film become decreasingly interesting. The story takes place in an unspecified city and country, and the characters remain nameless, which in reality would make communication extremely difficult in a group of blind people. The whole thing is obviously an allegory and the blindness is a metaphor for one thing or another, but this excessive metatextuality stifles the human drama. However, the performances are intense and Meirelles orchestrates this ambitious but flawed endeavour with a strong visual sense. Based on the novel by José Saramago, a Nobel Prize winning author from Portugal.
