Movie Review for "Blindness" (2008)

Blindness

As Far as People Can See

Right after the moment of the attacks on September 11, there was the impression that the planet was close to the end, lost in chaos and barbarism, fulfilled with irrationality and ignorance, as if the world's conscience or something like the collective unconscious was going to split: while the richest and most influential nation in the world was attacked, it was not clear nor understandable to immediately know from where the destruction was actually coming. Although the film adaptation of the book wrote by the Portuguese writer José Saramago was no direct related with the famous terrorist attacks, it is undeniable that both share the same theme, the same "zeitgeist "(the untranslatable German word for the spirit of an era). The horror, the fear and despair are just some of the elements in common. Roughly speaking, the biggest difference between them lies in the fact that in fiction, surrounded by metaphors, the world is plagued by an unexplained epidemic in which everyone becomes blind (except the protagonist, by Julianne Moore), while in fact, at least on the real case, it was terrorism that was causing destruction.

However, there are exact seven years between the real event and the movie. Director Fernando Meirelles, taken by the urge to read the book, had sought Luis Schwarcz, the brazilian agent of José Saramago, and asked him to ask the author about his interest in selling the copyrights for a film adaptation. The answer was no, and amid the bleak impasse Meirelles eventually paid for the copyrights of another book: City of God. Years passed by, and after the resounding international success of City of God (2002) film adaptation, the Brazilian director also directed The Constant Gardener (2005).

Blindness begins showing obsessive extreme close-up shots of each of the traffic lights that demonstrate the precision of an esthete. The idea immediately refers to the style of Errol Morris, who among other documentary masterpieces directed the classic "The Thin Blue Line", in 1988. Besides the amazing cinematography, on which the white color symbolizes a kind of blindness generated by over light, was up to director of photography César Charlonne to make important suggestions of locations. He also had a very important role by implementing the shooting method of four cameras simultaneously, which provided freedom and gave the possibility for improvisation. It is interesting to figure out how his work converges with the set design, the art direction and the performance of the actors in order to create a unit that suggests a visual concept for blindness, providing an immersive aesthetic experience. Director Fernando Meirelles once said on his personal blog that his intention was emulate frameworks that somehow make up the human imagination. Analyzing the shots, there can be found references to Hieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt, Malevich, some Dadaists, Cubists, Francis Bacon, Japanese prints, some screens of Lucien Freud, until a remarkable shot that refers to Brueguel painting.

It is worth to mention the great virtuosity in the dramatic use of rack focus, in a way that the audience can experience the anguish feeling of the sight fading to nothing. Transitions accentuate the claustrophobic feeling all the time, which reached its climax at total dark scene when Julianne Moore's character is in the market – the audience’s sensation is of a never ending torture. A scene that remind of the experimental films by Walter Ruttman, with only sound and a black screen.

But the book describes several shocking and disgusting moments. Meirelles saw himself in a dilemma: be faithful to the horror described in Saramago’s novel, he who also asked the Meirelles for more rough images on screen; or focus on the audience’s taste: how could someone have the strength to withstand the impact of cruel images? If Meirelles or any other director had chosen to follow all the rawness and human sordidness present in the novel, faithfully transposing the "filth" to the screen, the audience could be so reduced that not even the greatest of the iconoclasts could digest it. Therefore, any criticism of Meirelles' work accusing the "excess" of the dirt realism, or in relation to the rape scenes is not fair. In 1940, there was John Ford, making the classic adaptation of John Steinbeck, the classic The Grapes of Wrath. In the novel, a miserable character, devastated and completely hungry, satisfies his hunger by breastfeeding the bosom of an unknown old woman, a newly mother. The image was too strong for the movie, and ended up outside. Even 68 years after this event, this complex situation still occurred.

The deficiency leads the characters to be confined in that stronghold of craziness. In a situation of relatively few people, global problems manifest themselves even in a small scale. It does not take more than half a dozen people together to see emerge the sordid side of the man: there are organized crime, corruption, violence, sexism, racism, excessive greed for power and money. In this sense, it is clear that blindness is the metaphor for self-destruction, for the fascination for perversion. There is the old quote “man is the wolf of man”. The dehumanization process starts as the survival instinct arises in a desperate way. It was only with the restoration of relationships and affection that it allowed the reconstruction of their lives and re-humanization. There is a remarkable scene when the rain comes down, a symbol of redemption – not merely by chance after an image of Jesus Christ blindfolded.

The whole filmography of Fernando Meirelles contains many characteristics in common, as for example the aforementioned concern about fidelity when adapting a novel to screen. In City of God (2002), to ensure more sense of reality, he had chosen to use non-actors for certain roles. In that case there was a link to the documentary language, but Meirelles usually provide more freedom and possibilities to whom is acting, whether with a professional background or not. This directing style resembles not only a tradition in Brazilian cinema, but especially the great classics of the Neo-Realism cinema in Italy (post-1945), as seen in the urban and chaotic Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945). However, the similarities are not only about acting. It has been said that this film ended Fernando Meirelles’s trilogy about the fragility of the human being. Peter Bogdanovich used to say the legendary Austrian director Fritz Lang debuted in Germany Expressionism in the 20's to a successful career in the US, with its peak in Metropolis, from 1927 – also a tortured view of an urban society. Well, in his text, Bogdanovich synthesized Lang's work as "the man's struggle against the forces that seek to annihilate it." The sentence also fits to Meirelles cinema: drug trafficking in City of God; illegal testing of the pharmaceutical industry in The Constant Gardener; sightlessness in Blindness. In the last one, it's up to the audience to unravel it.