SPOILER ALERT: You need to prepare to watch “Blindness”

Even though “Blindness” was panned by critics at Cannes and Toronto, I actually enjoyed the film.I’ve got a reason for it, and that’s because I read the book it is based on. The book itself is one everyone should read, and for the same reasons, the movie is one you should watch. Here’s a way to pierce through the fog.

A major reason I thnk why people don’t like this film because it’s too successful at making you feel blind, unsure of what’s going on, lost. Look at Roger Ebert’s review:

“Blindness” is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I’ve ever seen. It is an allegory about a group of people who survive under great stress, but frankly I would rather have seen them perish than sit through the final three-quarters of the film. Not only is it despairing and sickening, it’s ugly. Denatured, sometimes overexposed, sometimes too shadowy to see, it is an experiment to determine how much you can fool with a print before ending up with mud, intercut with brightly lit milk.

I admit this is true. The film has its cinematographic moments. however, Ebert can’t piece the film together because the director pulls out every trick in the bag to disorient you for a good reason.

So here are the necessary spoilers and caveats when watching Blindness. (Well, it’s no longer apt to call it a ’spoiler’ since I can only make it better by telling you this.)

• The book makes you feel blind. In that spirit, the movie tries to make you feel blind too by using a whole bunch of camera tricks that are outside the norm of regular cinematography. Just bear with it and take it in.
• A quick summary of “Blindness”. It’s about a woman who doesn’t lose her sight in a blindness epidemic. The initial cases are quarantined in an asylum, with ironically no help from the outside. More people come in everyday. It’s a kingdom of the blind, with people pissing and shitting and stumbling around. It quickly descends into mobster rule. There’s something to be said about the human condition, politics and ethics, but you decide that on your own.
• Nobody in the movie is named. We’re used to having the names of pivotal characters given to us, because this signifies ‘this is a character you need to pay attention to’. The movie does away with that because it doesn’t need to. Arguably, when you’re blind and you’re reduced to such a state, it doesn’t really matter anyway.
• Why doesn’t the lady go blind? Where did he find a gun? Where is the city location? . Plot device, or it doesn’t really matter.

Further spoilers ahead.

There’s a certain irony about using a visual medium to depict blindness, but in a certain way it works too. Imagine being confused throughout the whole film. Then as a character regains his sight, the movie regains normal cinematographic ‘language’ to parallel plot development. I’m not sure whether this works or not because I know exactly what’s going to happen as the movie doesnbn’t deviate from the book. But through the optic of the book, it’s easy to see the film for what it tries to do.

One paragraph review: Watch it with a friend who read the book. I like Ruffalo and Moore.