Blindness (***)

Directed by: Fernando Meirelles
Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Alice Braga, Gael Garcie Bernal, Sandra Oh
Seen: May 26th 2009

*** Out of ****

If everyone were to go blind right now, what would you do? How would you even get home? The thought of a GPS popped into my head since it has voice instructions, but immediately out again since you first have to type in your destination. Out of fear you will probably capitulate to some primal urge to survive, but in what way?

Blindness starts with a close-up of traffic lights. Green, amber, then red. Again. Then a man stopping his car just as everyone gets going – he’s suddenly gone blind. Passers-by help, one even drives him home, only to steal his car, and then go blind. How much of what we do is truly selfless, and how much is done with some form of personal gain in mind? The man goes to a doctor, played by Mark Ruffalo, who cannot find anything wrong with him, so he goes home, in the process coming into contact with various people who go on their various ways proliferating the spreading of the “disease”. The next morning the doctor is blind too, and as he realises the possibility of contagion he tries to push his wife (Moore) away, but she insists on holding him. When they call a hospital the next morning he is picked up by an ambulance and men in hazmat suits, the epidemic is spreading faster than people care, and fear drives the government to lock people up in quarantine without hesitance. Moore goes with Ruffalo, and they end up in an old medical institution, Moore caring for everyone, she and her husband keeping the fact that she can see a secret.

Things seem to work out at first, but the fear driving the creation of this quarantine facility excludes proper planning, and as food becomes scarce and the place becomes a mess, this dystopic society gives birth to a criminal element trying to rise to the top of the chain, and Gael Garcia Bernal is the catalyst, proclaiming himself as King of Ward Three, in straight opposition to Rufallo’s Ward One. Bernal gets his hands on a gun (which seems to have an unlimited amount of bullets), and Ward Three monopolises the food, forcing people to pay with their possessions and later with their women. In this land of the blind the previously blind seem to be king, or at least chief advisor to the king – as one man familiar with blindness now has a distinct advantage. And a war of sorts breaks out.

The film is not without flaw, as some scenes, to me, felt justified only by a misguided need to go the extra mile to shock the viewer as to the levels of brutality and animality that exists in man, even if the worst parts of it is not displayed on screen. Many things become irrelevant without sight, and this is not put to the fore strongly enough – a joke about people indicating their vote by raising their hands being the only mention of some of the effects. People walking around naked in the background brings another realisation – no need for clothing anymore. One thing I thought the movie had wrong, at least partially, is that people will stop using toilets and simply do their business everywhere. Do people not still remember toilets? A moot point, I know.

The film is expertly filmed, making the viewer panic for a moment at times (even if just subconsciously), feeling the blindness. And it also brings across some more optimistic thinking regarding us humans, and by the end credits I was unsettled but smiling. If you believe you are a prisoner to anything, then you will be, and only those who punch through will effectively survive. Those that fall victim to their circumstances will rarely succeed, and the same goes for those who try to manipulate circumstances in their own favour. But those who find the beauty even in dire situations are the ones who will endure, as the Man with the Eye Patch (Glover) realises. Any diversity has a good side to it, even though it might not always be apparent at first.