dir. Fernando Meirelles | Canada, Brazil, Japan | 120 minutes | cert. R
The best criticism of this film was given by a pair unwitting critics during the dénouement of Blindness. The couple’s arrival in the cinema during the last few minutes of the film would normally have been infuriatingly distracting and enough to fill other patrons with anger as these people arrived too early for the next feature but the fact that their mistake was caused by the similarity of the end of Blindness with the type of advertisement played before a screening, led me to forgiveness, and them to what was probably a spoiler moment. Unfortunately it was the film as a whole, not just the final cathartic moment that failed to deliver the same level of profundity as Jose Saramago’s source novel. So while viewing Blindness, I couldn’t help but be aware of consistent excruciating attempts by the director to manipulate moviegoers into accepting his vision. However, while gimmicks such as testosterone fueled sound design and shocking imagery constantly hit the audience, it simply reminds us of the film’s shortcomings.
The score can play a major part in the furthering of the narrative of a film. One could say that it is an integral part of the process by which the audience is manipulated into traveling down certain trains of thought in relation to the themes and plot of the film. In Blindness, Meirelles seems to make use of the composed music in a way which is designed to confuse the audience’s geographical awareness by relating the themes of the film to not just one culture but seemingly every culture. Sure enough, with each different ethnic instrument, from didgeridoos to thai gongs, the director’s ambition of clouding the geographical location is drummed into us, in every sense of the word. Incidentally, the film’s composer Marco Antônio Guimarães is founding member of Uakti, a group I am a fan of. He has done some interesting work in the past, but not as a film composer. His album Aguas da Amazonia is a beautiful collection of arrangements of music by Philip Glass played by the Uakti ensemble on traditional instruments. I imagine it is such work that played a part in his commission as composer for Blindness, as the stylings of Philip Glass is a favourite for directors who want to add emotional integrity and momentum to films at risk of lacking in that area. Perhaps though it is unwise to blame a composer for their work that ends up on screen, as it’s such a collaborative process, the director being the one who stands responsible at the end of the day. The music of Blindness feels like it never really reaches the level of scoring the psyche of the film. It has the feel of a score that was orchestrated before the actual composing happened. It was so fixated on using certain ethnic instruments, that the actual music (melody, harmony, emotion, meaning) was left out of the process.
The opening scenes of Blindness were impressive and promised the delivery of a solid Meirelles film, nicely mixed with the more abstract of film making techniques. Unfortunately it was not only the music that undermined the director’s ambitions. Aside from an overly enthusiastic, bordering on tasteless use of surround sound and aural gimmicks (such as the bell heralding the onset of blindness), there was what could be considered a major miscasting in using Mark Ruffolo.
Ruffolo is an actor who is probably the opposite of who I imagined the doctor character to look like. A solidly built man who looks like he can handle himself well in physical situations, he is not the kind of person one would imagine allowing a situation to get to the point where his wife is gang raped. The doctor in Saramago’s novel was a beacon of wisdom and rationality trying to avoid the descent into savagery, Ruffolo’s doctor just comes across as a coward consistently trying to avoid confrontation, allowing servility from his wife and spouting banalities about avoiding war.
The screenplay, through excluding a third of the novel, fell short of delivering major plot points needed to convey the profundity of their situation. The survivors roaming of the city not only explored the remains of a broken infrastructure, but also explored the depths of a broken humanity, in themselves and the humans (and dogs) they meet. Meirelles never allowed this exposition on the wandering survivors. The book did this excellently, for example, the old woman living in the prostitute’s apartment. Moments like this in the book helped further the ‘everyman’ element of their tragic situation and frailty.
As well as abridging the novel, the film should simply have been subtitled. This would have allowed the viewer a margin of tolerance for the poor translation of the original work. What comes across as poetic in the original Portuguese, comes across as a strange proverb-like aphoristic pithiness. For me, this was a giant distraction and constantly interrupted the flow of the film.
Saramago’s novel contains rape scenes which are disturbing and graphic. In Meirelles’ film, the same scenes are presented appropriately. It’s just that the surrounding scenes have reduced the film to something flippant and abrupt, totally undermining his handling of the more difficult shots. Importantly, this causes one to view his treatment of rape as just yet another manipulation, severely wrong footing the film, and making me wonder if Meirelles has the emotional maturity as a film-maker to pull such a movie off. A conclusion that was overwhelming reached by the end of the film.
[view Blindness trailer]
