Adapted from Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago’s novel, from the director of City of God, and with a heavy-weight cast including Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover, Blindness opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival with much anticipation.
Transposed from the novel’s nameless South American city to a nameless North American city, Blindness dispassionately recounts social meltdown as a mysterious plague of blindness strikes apparently at random.
Meirelles cleverly tells this apocalyptic tale from both a micro and macro perspective. We see the effects of the plague decimate the morality of a panicked society. A brutal and unthinking military enforces quarantine for initial victims within the confines of a disused hospital. With any physical contact between the stricken and the outside world forbidden on pain of death, the hospital soon forms its own micro-social system. This nightmarish setting quickly degenerates into a morally bankrupt survival of the fittest. Food is traded for sex and only the strongest (read: most savage and least civilised) survive.
This film has split audiences on the international festival circuit. Its pedigree suggests a must-see international prestige picture, yet its relentless depiction of some of the most distasteful behaviour that mankind has to offer has proved too much for some critics and audiences.
As a commercial apocalypse film in the vein of The Day After Tomorrow or the like, it is simply too grim, unrelenting and has little time for the usual self-congratulatory paeans to the indomitable spirit of man etc. Yet its resolution has equally irritated some quarters who were hoping for something a little deeper with more political bite. But there is no denying the visceral power of the film and the questions it raises concerning what it means to be human and civilised – and just how strong our grip on moral certainty under pressure really is.
