Pays : Japon, Brésil, Canada
Genre : Drame
Durée : 1h58
Date de sortie : 30 juillet 2008
Avec : Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover
Réalisateur : Fernando Meirelles
Le pays est frappé par une épidémie de cécité qui se propage à une vitesse fulgurante. Les premiers contaminés sont mis en quarantaine dans un hôpital désaffecté où ils sont rapidement livrés à eux-mêmes, privés de tout repère. Ils devront faire face au besoin primitif de chacun : la volonté de survivre à n’importe quel prix. Seule une femme n’a pas été touchée par la " blancheur lumineuse ". Elle va les guider pour échapper aux instincts les plus vils et leur faire reprendre espoir en la condition humaine.
(L'avis exprimé par les rédacteurs de cette rubrique est indépendant du travail et des choix du Jury oecuménique.)
14 mai 2008
A fine but very uncomfortable film to watch, disturbing. Based on a novel by Nobel laureate, Jose Saramago, Blindness is a film for reflection. With its blindness (both real and symbolic) coming upon victims suddenly and its being contagious, it invites its audience to identify with the characters and their traumatic experiences, visualising how difficult it is for sightless people to deal with practical and ordinary things unless they are familiar or they receive help, let alone an epidemic, isolation and danger. What would we do in these circumstances ?
This becomes more philosophically and ethically demanding as the plot continues. How can a growing group of suddenly blinded people, herded together in a rundown mental institution and virtually left to themselves, manage ? (Isn’t this what society did to the unwanted afflicted in the past ?) Will conflict break out ? And, what if a jumped up, opportunistic demagogue with a gun takes over, demanding obedience, robbing people for provisions and, most powerfully, manipulating the hungry group so that they give up their women to his mini-empire ?
And what of society which is motivated by fear and then terror ? And guards ill-equipped to manage situations like this and trigger-happy ? At first we see a government minister making statements but this line of plot disappears from the film just as it disappears from the life of the blind. Criticism of governments today concerning social care, and care-lessness is frequently the same today. And, should they get out, what kind of blind world will they find, a wrecked world and the blind rummaging in the wreckage ?
All these issues and more are given a somewhat ponderous explicitation by Danny Glover’s solemn and rhetorical voiceover, elaborating the questions and explaining some of the behaviour for those who have not picked it up by watching.
In Blindness, we are introduced to an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) but it is his ordinary wife who does not go blind but who is the backbone of this abandoned society. She is played by Julianne Moore, unmade up and looking haggard, who gives the film great strength. Her group could not have survived without her. But, what is the meaning (real and symbolic) of a Godlike (?) person who can see and direct the lives of those in need around her ?
There are some religious implications in the screenplay. Julianne Moore says that the condition’s technical name sounds like agnosticism… Some of the peaceful survivors take refuge in a church where the statues of the saints and of Jesus on the cross are blindfolded… And, in the final moments, we are unsettled again and wonder whether this Christlike woman has to take the similarity as far as it will go.
