Reviews
Blindness
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Certificate 18, 120 mins
This is not a nice glossy film, it is not easy watching, but it is a film for our times. It is a nightmarish tale, based on a novel by the Nobel laureate Jose Saramago, and directed by Fernando Meirelles of City of God fame. An epidemic of white blindness strikes a city and its first victim, a Japanese commuter (Yusuke Iseya), is blinded in his car in the middle of the motorway in the rush hour. He visits an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who can find nothing wrong with his eyes. But within days the doctor is struck blind, along with others who attended his surgery. We find ourselves in an apocalyptic panic as the blindness spreads. The state takes extreme measures to contain the plague, starting by corralling the blind in a disused mental institution. Ominous looking armed guards in anti-infection masks dump food from afar.
The doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore) fakes blindness to support her husband in the quarantine centre. Conditions there deteriorate as the epidemic escalates. Compassion and common sense are displaced by fear and selfishness. Moore’s character works hard in gruelling conditions to maintain a semblance of marital life and neighbourly generosity. It is a masterfully restrained performance. Her ethereal fine-boned features coupled with her ordinary acts of goodness magnifiy her presence in the film as a saintly balm and iconised beauty amongst the insanity and horror of the ward. She is the prism through which we experience the ugliness the film unflinchingly and relentlessly explores.
But like all saints she is made of this earth and mediating in the increasingly aggressive ward takes its toll, until she takes justice into her own hands. What she does seems so right, but once you have had a coffee and recovered from the events in the film it raises a deep theological question: Was it saintly in the true sense of the word? The film does not ask that question, it merely assumes that there was simply no other option. Christians, though, will want to look beyond the humanist framework that is so compellingly offered in this film.
It is fascinatingly shot. Meireilles and his cameraman create highly charged hallucinatory and apocalyptic images of urban collapse and moral implosion. The issue in this film, as in Jesus’ parable of the blind, is not physical blindness but blindness of heart, and the camerawork becomes almost another character in creating a disturbing visual experience of what it is like to see and not see.
There are a few occasion where the film briefly falters, but the overall tsunami-like pace sweeps one on, whilst a few characters, like insignificant corks in the maelstrom, struggle to remain human in the mire of degraded civilization. The ending of the film is not the sunset of Hollywood hope, but an exquisite bittersweet reality, the difficult truth of living in beautiful but fallen world.
The violence in the film is brutal and the premeditated gang rape scene is devastating, but somehow strangely and tragically true. This is the base behavior that happens, that we read about in our papers. But the drama of film is more potent than a newspaper report and its setting in a modern sophisticated city challenges us to ask, what we would have done in this situation.
The veneer of civilization is very thin. We live in increasingly unpredictable times: epidemics, sudden floods in unlikely places, terrorist attacks, and our own recent banking crisis. This film is a valuable dramatic warning. If you go to see it, use it as a sacred space to explore your own thin veneer and replace it with the muscle of the Holy Spirit and the moral fibre and strength of Christ’s character.
Shan Stephens
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