Cluelessness versus Blindness

Upon arriving at the Debussy Theatre for the festival's first film, the opening-night morality drama, "Blindness," I spotted an MSN Movies contributor waiting in line.

 

After exchanging pleasantries, he leaned in and said, "Sir, you may want to check your zipper." I did and then realised I had just enjoyed coffee and walked several blocks with my fly open. Thankfully, we Americans love telling others about our foibles. It also begs an important question: Reader, can you honestly trust a man's critical opinion when he doesn't even realise when he's sailing at half mast? You have 10 days to decide …

White Out

First up for consideration is "Blindness," which has the honour of both opening Cannes and being entered in the official competition (it joins 21 other features, all vying for the prestigious Palme d'Or, not to mention many other awards). It's a fairly ironic choice. After all, what faculty does one need more than sight during a film festival? Yes, hearing is helpful, but there are plenty of subtitles. Trust me, you don't want smell here, especially on hot, muggy days. And fewer and fewer people actually think about what they see, so thought, reason and analysis aren't as important. But one definitely needs eyes to take in the optical overload that is a film festival, no matter how blurry and battered they are about to become.

So, as if to say, "Hey, aren't y'all lucky to watch what we're about to show you over the next few weeks?" Cannes kicks things off with an allegorical tale in which a city (perhaps the world) is hit, seemingly overnight, with a plague: A contagious blindness hits one man while driving, then blindness is passed on to an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) and so on. The afflicted see not darkness but blinding white light ("Feels like I'm swimming in milk," admits the driver). God's punishment for man's selfishness? Probably, because director Fernando Meirelles ("City of God," "The Constant Gardener") isn't really interested in telling a tale; he's got a serious morality play on his mind.

After a very long setup, where we see dozens go through the same "Oh, crap, I'm blind!" scenarios (cue screaming and stumbling into walls), the film shifts into ham-fisted overdrive.

 

Once the government steps in, hoards the inflicted together and vanishes them to an abandoned mental institution, "Blindness" becomes an international microcosm: a multitude of nationalities and races fill (and fight and f--- in and destroy) the quarantine centre -- imagine "Babel" and all of its "messages" and archetype-cum-characters stuffed in a single claustrophobic, decaying institution. We have an upper-class white couple (Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, who somehow is immune to the affliction and can see the chaos around her), a middle-class Japanese couple (Yusuke Iseya and Yoshino Kimura), a black narrator (Danny Glover), a Latina prostitute (Alice Braga) who mothers a small child, an evil Mexican entrepreneur (Gael Garcia Bernal) and a Canadian thief (Don McKellar, who also wrote the screenplay). Oh, and eventually a loyal dog that is more humane than the animals he serves is thrown in the mix.

 

If you haven't figured it out -- and you will very, very early on -- "Blindness" is a big metaphor. How early? Glover tells us 10 seconds in: "I don't think we went blind, but we always were that way." Deep, dude, deep. Thanks for verbalizing that subtext.