Blindness

Directed by Fernando Meirelles, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Don McKellar

Since its premiere at Cannes this year, Fernando Meirelles' film has been coldly received by many critics, on the grounds that it soft-pedals or dumbs down its source material: the 1995 novel by Portuguese Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago about an outbreak of contagious blindness in an unnamed modern city.

For me, Meirelles, along with screenwriter Don McKellar and cinematographer Cesar Charlone, have created an elegant, gripping and visually outstanding film. It responds to the novel's notes of apocalypse and dystopia, and its disclosure of a spiritual desert within the modern city, but also to its persistent qualities of fable, paradox and even whimsy.

The catastrophe begins with a terrified Japanese businessman (Yusuke Iseya) who goes blind at the wheel of his luxury car, seeing only a milky whiteness, and passes his condition on to an opportunist thief (Don McKellar) who is pretending to help him - and so it goes on.

All these people, in this casual chain of human non-contact, are led like terrified animals into the sordid, hellish blind camp: They neither knew nor much cared who they brushed up against in the teeming city, but now this sequence of indifference is transformed into a horribly important choreography of doom. The key fact is that one inmate, the doctor's wife, played by Julianne Moore (pictured), can secretly see; she alone must bear the burden of observing how horrendous the world can become.

The world of the blind camp is an unthinkable nightmare, but for all its horror and despair, it is not aimed at us with precisely the same realist stab as, say, Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men.

When I first saw this, it reminded me of both George Romero's zombie movies and Peter Shaffer's stage-play Black Comedy; on a second viewing, this latter, absurdist quality predominates, although with a darker hue: the white blindness as black tragedy.

Cinema is a visual medium, so no film version of Blindness could entirely reproduce its buried literary conceit of the "blind" reader having to imagine what the narrator is describing, and yet this film is an intelligent, tightly constructed, supremely confident adaptation.

(China Daily 11/25/2008 page19)