Playing a Blinder

Survivors shuffle sightlessly through plundered shopping malls. Feral dogs roam the streets in search of new corpses to feast upon. The last remnants of society give way to extortion and rape.

Welcome to Blindness, the new dystopian nightmare from Fernando Meirelles, a thrilling, terrifying work of speculative fiction that makes the acclaimed director’s previous depictions of global corruption (The Constant Gardener) and South American squalor (City Of God) look like an extended stay on a cruise liner.
“Next time, I’m doing a light romantic comedy,” promises the Oscar-nominated Brazilian filmmaker when I catch up with him at the London Film Festival.
Falling somewhere between science fiction and Apocalyptica, Mr. Meirelles’ adaptation of the best-selling novel by Nobel-prize winner José Saramago follows the denizens of an unnamed city as, one by one, they’re stricken by a mysterious virus that robs them of their sight. Julianne Moore, playing a character identified solely as the ‘Doctor’s Wife’, is the only one who remains unaffected in the quarantine zone where she tends to her husband (Mark Ruffalo), a former prostitute (Alice Krige) and a makeshift family unit. As conditions worsen and supplies dwindle, the weak are preyed upon by the wicked and a dastardly former lounge boy (Gael Garcia Bernal) proclaims himself overlord.
“It’s not apocalyptic in the way that I Am Legend is,” explains Mr. Meirelles. “It’s more psychological than that. It’s basically an excuse to put people in an asylum and see how they behave. I’m less interested in the dystopian elements. For me it’s about characters losing their humanity.”
Meirelles’ compelling film has been a long time in the making. Author José Saramago has been a careful guardian of his 1995 source novel and has previously rejected separate offers from Whoopi Goldberg and Gael Garcia Bernal to buy the rights. It took a lengthy meeting with screenwriter Don McKellar to win Saramago over, though the novelist did have certain conditions.
“He joked that he didn’t want it to be like a zombie movie,” says Mr. Meirelles, “but he only requested two things. He didn’t want the city where the film is set to be recognisable because he didn’t want it to be about place. He also wanted the film to be in English where I’d been thinking about it in Portuguese.”
Though jollied along by breathtaking style, an intriguing narrative, and immaculate performances – even the mighty Julianne Moore has rarely been better – Blindness has received erratic notices in the US where the film failed to score anything like the box-office success it deserved. Meanwhile Max Payne hits the number one spot. Whither common sense, I wonder.
“It’s a hard sell,” admits the director. “It’s a parable that suggests we’re all blind. Sometimes we’re blind in a small sense. A husband and wife can be blind when they argue and cannot see one another’s point of view. Then there’s a collective blindness about things we don’t want to see. We don’t see starvation in Sudan, for example. I wanted to preserve that allegorical sense of Saramago’s writing. It’s a style of Portuguese that’s similar to Old English.”
He laughs: “But I don’t know. I’m not making life easy for myself making such a film.”
One suspects that various kerfuffles surrounding the its release cannot have helped his cause. Several organisations have protested the film’s representation of the blind community, notably the National Federation of the Blind in America which claimed “to deplore(s) this film, which will do substantial harm to the blind of America and the world.” The body later picketed movie theatres in at least 21 states, the largest mobilisation in the organisation’s 68-year history.
“They missed the point completely,” sighs the director. “These characters aren’t supposed to represent the blind who’ve adapted to their condition. They’re supposed to be people like you and me if we were suddenly struck blind. But we screened the film for similar organisations in Portugal with interpreters and they didn’t agree that the film had anything to do with blindness as a condition.”
These controversies have marred an otherwise remarkable achievement. Using milky white light, reflections, shadows and painterly references to Pieter Bruegel and Lucien Freud, Mr. Mierelles has achieved the near impossible by visually representing the sensation of being blind.
“I just kept shooting surfaces so you’re never too sure what you’re looking at,” says the director. “It was a difficult process because I had to forget everything I knew. You can’t have a conversation with two people looking at each other. You have to work against all your instincts as a filmmaker. And I’m still getting used to thinking in English so I really was going in blind.”