Blindness
Was a remarkable film.
The screen was constantly overlaid with juxtapositions and divisions within the world of the film that were were beautifully (if perhaps unintentionally) multichannel – a group of windows, layers in a glass buildings interior – a disorienting quality of not being sure what is near, what far, the wrong things being in focus, off-kilter focus points, blurs and moving lights that changed position. Divisions using mirrors, and glass walls and mirrored doors were in domestic scenes, jarringly so, to show the divisions between couples, between the sighted and the blind.
The stoy moved forward with a dizzying and deliberately disorienting pace, so that we’e often as unsure of what we’re really seeing as the people who were going blind.
One stoy element didn’t ing tue- that the on sighted person – the one with ‘the vision” in every sense – lets the violent blind men from wad three rape and hurt the women in their demands for payment of food before she uses a scissors to kill their vile leader – the irrationality of her waiting stops the story.
The three acts corresponded roughly to – people becoming blind in the ordinary world, their incaceration and descent into a kind of hellish dog eat dog world and finally their freedom into a world gone literally blind and chaotic and without the basic sustenance for life. The last act was so convincing that I thought: time to pick up the phone and call ruthie and get started with setting up the north woods lake as a refuge against chaos when it comes. The world could turn into this. it seemingly has started to.
The arbitrariness and anonymity and harshness of the guards reminded me of the st. paul police at the rnc. No one was really in chage – it was just like you economic meltdown occurring right now. The experts are lost. And they all succumb too, eventually.
Julianne’s moore decision to play blind is as abrupt and instinctive as it is useful. I’m blind too – she says, just to stay with her husband. Everything is mysterious and it’s rare we get a movie that offers so few answers. No answers, really – none. Clearly, it’s infectious, whateve this is – we see the links, how people infect others. We see the occasional convenience of not being seen, of not knowing what youre seeing. The blindness of the husband and its impact on them as a couple seems like a metapho of any marriage and its myiad pitfalls. I watched and was able to understand the love of husband and wife – the the implicity betrayals of that – in a way I never could before. Because of loving jim.
Of most of the first act, I was just watching the framing, the angling, the way the dop focus was used to keep us offbase, to keep the screen always divided but not in a way that made sense- soft edges hit up against hard ones, translucence and opacity vying for control.
Mostly blues- cold whites, grays and blues, through the whole movie – greens in the institution. No one answers the emergency line. Part of how frightening it was was how familiar it all seemed, how right in its unfeeling bureaucracy pitted against the needs of a lost and helpless population, unused to deprivation, to loss of anything.
Good and evil seemed blurred as well. of course, the one other woman the husband does have sex with really is a whore, literally – and gives both her john and the hotel maid who helped her when she became blind the same blindness.
There were small things that were off, o became tedious, but for the most part, it was riveting and relentless. And the first half visually stunning.
