THE themes of “Blindness” go by in a blur. When resi dents of a nameless cosmo polis are suddenly struck blind, the vagueness seems so deliberate that the allegory could be steering our attention to AIDS, pacifism, the surreal craziness of Latin American dictatorship or the Golden Rule.
Director Fernando Meirelles (“The Constant Gardener”) situates the outbreak in an unidentified international-flavored city. When one man suddenly loses his sight while his car is stopped at a traffic light, the shocking ease with which total strangers slip into bad Samaritanism sets the grim tone. You don’t normally expect a movie to be this unpleasant to sit through unless it’s about the Holocaust or was directed by Edward Burns.
Blindness seems to be contagious, and soon so many people have been struck blind that an authoritarian government forces them into an abandoned mental hospital. Among them are an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), who can see but pretends to be blind so she can look after her man. Why she alone is immune is a mystery; she’s sort of like the doctor in “The Plague.”
As the wards fill up with helpless victims and the halls teem with human waste, a younger man (Gael Garcia Bernal) declares himself dictator – first jokingly, then not. Things that shouldn’t matter anymore suddenly matter more than ever – race, money, jewels.
The point is made with touches of black comedy and a mise-en-scéne that suggests a claustrophobic apocalypse. The streets empty out. Everyone is afraid to drive when anyone else on the road can be struck blind at any moment. A mass rape played with the jauntiness of “A Clockwork Orange” led to more than a few walkouts at the screening I attended at the relatively unshockable Toronto Film Festival.
A cinematographer’s toy box, the movie suggests blindness by glare, bursts of light, overexposures, double exposures, shadows, backlighting and characters speaking off camera. There are also a dozen other tricks that at times make you think the whole thing could be compressed a bit – to, perhaps, the length of a “Twilight Zone” episode, which is basically what “Blindness” amounts to.
I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did. The story seems designed to apply to whatever fear is nibbling around your subconscious. If the moral is that we all ought to be nice to each other, that isn’t quite enough with which to close out such a strange, sometimes harrowing and sometimes wicked movie.
BLINDNESS
Unfocused.
Running time: 121 minutes. Rated R (violence, rape, profanity, nudity). At the Lincoln Square, the Kips Bay, the 34th Street, others.