The folks who use review aggregator sites such as Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic are likely to be a bit mislead on Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness. The rough pre-Cannes cut was reviewed by Michael back in February, and I guessing something close to the Cannes cut was recently reviewed by Marina (and I guess this because she mentions a voice-over narration in the film which was absent from the cut of the film I managed to catch at TIFF in mid-September.) Thus the Frankenstein’s Monster styled amalgamation of reactions to a movie that has been in flux all year is more than a tad confusing. So when I express my own confusion to why so many people disliked the film or felt that it was simply too earnest or too forgettable, I’ll confess my ignorance insofar as I don’t know what version of the film they saw. The version I managed to see (hopefully) was the version that will be playing in a Theatre-Near-You this coming weekend. It is a film that I recommend without further reservation.

A sign of the times or not, there has been a lot of apocalyptic cinema lately. And classy productions that make serious efforts to transcend the usual genre styling of these stories. Films like 28 Weeks Later, Time of the Wolf, Children of Men and Pontypool (review here) are sharp, arty presentations that distinguish themselves from the commercial pitter-patter of I Am Legend and the slew of Resident Evil sequels. Blindness certainly aims to play in the territory of the former. It is a high class production with a ‘name’ director and a talented cast. While there is the obligatory scenes of society collapsing, deserted and trash strewn streets and the various accoutrement that accompany these types of tales and the ‘un-policed anarchy’ that allows for men to indulge their evil side because nobody is watching (made very much literal in this case), the thing that struck me is that the film chooses to chew on what folks do with privilege.

This is clear early on in the film as it indicates the privileges of the rich Japanese couple contrasted with Don McKellar‘s petty thief and a prostitute (played by City of God and I Am Legend‘s Alice Braga). You see it in the doctor (Mark Ruffalo, an optometrist, natch) and his wife (Julianne Moore) and the dynamics of their relationship. He is the career driven man, calm and the focus of the relationship; she is not too responsible for much housewife. Their dinner at home and how the conversation and the texture of their interaction reflects this. When the blindness epidemic hits you see the evolution of these privileges amongst these characters and the palette gets richer in the ecosystem of the quarantine cell. The entrance in particular of Maury Chaykin‘s born-blind character who becomes an accountant/adviser of the all-male ward lead by Gael Garcia Bernal. This privilege (a more proficient blind man) enables the ward to prey off of the more benevolent and mixed ward being lead by a more committee approach and the good Doctor. Of course, Julianne Moore, who can actually see, uses her position of privilege to help in subtle ways to allow for the democratic approach the group enjoys. It’s not till the kinder ward is overtly and drastically threatened that Moore begins to assert her significant perquisite to declare all out war in the quarantined zone and later lead the surviving members into the wide and smashed world.

In the land of the blind, the two-eyed woman is Queen, and this is made quite evident in the third act of Blindness. The surviving members get to reform a semblance of civilization not because they are better or more moral than the other parties (an interesting form of adultery is buried in the middle chapter of the film, as is some interesting takes on gender roles, obligations and choices), but rather this privileged few and their Queen are given an exemption from falling back down to the animal-state only from the power they possess in the Doctors wife’s sight.

They can stick together because of her privilege, not in spite of it. I found this an interesting thing to chew on. Something that creeps out and beyond the stylistic telling, the lack of character background, the obvious parable of things and the apocalypse setting. I do think Blindness is one of the more interesting films of both the genre and of the year 2008 (and this is despite of the last three minutes of the film which unfortunately took a fair bit of the edge off the proceedings).

Pay no attention to the aggregators, they are blind.