Out of Sight

When inhabitants of a city mysteriously go blind, they give in to primal chaos.

by Sam Adams

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BLIND AMBITION: Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo star in director Fernando Meirelles' story of information and power. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Struck sightless by a mysterious plague, the citizens of the unnamed city in Fernando Meirelles' Blindness grope their way through the world like moles, searching vainly for the light — or rather a respite from it. The universe into which they have been plunged is not black but overwhelmingly white, a luminous sea that dissolves every trace of the visible world. The plague's Patient Zero (Yusuke Iseya), struck blind while waiting for a light to change, describes it as "like swimming in milk."

The problem, in other words, is not a lack of information but too much of it, an inability to distinguish between light and dark, meaningful and meaningless. As the plague progresses, Meirelles uses an array of visual devices — shallow depth of field, off-center framing, overexposing the film — to destabilize the audience's sense of sight, but he opens the movie with an assault on the ears, turning the screech and howl of traffic into a cacophonous urban wail. Hearing everything at once is as good as hearing nothing at all.

Within seconds after the first victim is struck, the social order begins to crumble. Stuck in rush hour traffic and unable to see, he is assisted by a good Samaritan (Don McKellar), who drives him home and then promptly makes off with his car. An eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) tries to make sense of his condition, but it seems to have no physical basis. The best he can manage is something called agnosis, a condition in which the brain fails to translate the messages coming from the eye. The victim's eyes still function, but he cannot see.

Among the first casualties of the plague, which soon spreads to the doctor and the car thief, and thence like wildfire, are the victims' past selves. All that they have been, all that they have built up, becomes irrelevant. After they are rounded up and placed in detention centers by a government anxious (but unable) to contain the infection, their lives become purely existential. All that matters is what they do. Like José Saramago's source novel, McKellar's adaptation denies the characters the luxury of proper names. The credits identify them by profession, or by distinguishing characteristics: the doctor is The Doctor, the prostitute is Woman with the Dark Glasses. (Mercifully, it's never necessary for the characters to address themselves as such; for the most part, the absence of names is tacit, rather than explicit.)

The exception is Gael García Bernal's bartender, who crafts himself a new identity out of the new world's rubble. With supplies running low and no help from the outside world, the doctor tries to institute a rudimentary democracy, but Bernal stages an impromptu coup, impetuously declaring himself king, and instantly amassing a group of followers who would rather take by force than share and share alike. Like pirates on an unmapped sea, they plunder heedlessly, demanding payment in money, goods and eventually flesh for a share of the remaining food. The Stygian orgy that results is the movie's moral low point, a hellish vision of primal appetites untempered by reason or belief.

The sole bulwark against the king's despotic reign is the doctor's wife (Julianne Moore), who proves inexplicably immune to the plague's ravages. Hiding her sightedness so she can stay by her husband's side, she moves soundlessly among the blind, but her insight is dwarfed by the brute force of the King's ad hoc army. In this land of the blind, the one-eyed woman is not queen, but a prophet whose warnings might as easily make her a martyr as a savior.

Blindness is high-wire filmmaking, and its bold strokes will strike some as insufferably moralistic. But Meirelles and McKellar don't make easy judgments, or stock their world with sneering villains and plaster saints. (McKellar, who envisioned a similar scenario in his own film Last Night, casts himself as an irredeemable sleazebag.) The movie is a lament, not a jeremiad, a cry of despair tempered with a note of frail hope. Toward the movie's end, Moore casts her eyes to the sky and sees only blankness, a wall of cloud as uniform as the plague victims' whited-out vision. The movie's greatest fear, or greatest recognition, is that there is nothing up there to see, and that only a thin scrim separates us from our animal nature. As the blind are first shoved into their prison, a man cries out amid the din: "Can we have some guidance, please?"

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Blindness | Directed by Fernando Meirelles |A Miramax Films release