Ways of not seeing

The original Portuguese title of Blindness, the 1995 novel that prompted José Saramago’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira, or Essay About Blindness. I think it’s worth mentioning here because those unfamiliar with Saramago’s work might glean from this specification some sense of this extraordinary novel’s tone, which, characteristically, is digressive, allegorical, and basically unconcerned with character development or the well-measured escalation of drama—the sorts of elements that conventionally make for engaging movies. It’s equally worth mentioning that Blindness the movie, as adapted by Don McKellar and directed by Fernando Meirelles, is clearly uninterested in being a conventional sort of movie. Yet in its attempts to carve out its own identity while making select concessions to the basic form and structure of a dramatic feature, the film seems to lose out in both gambits. Blindness is a deeply intriguing movie that can’t fulfill its promises, a strangely flat apocalyptic drama that rarely shows signs of knowing what it’s about.

It begins, boldly, and not unlike a horror movie, with the first victim of the mysterious disease of “white blindness” becoming afflicted while waiting behind the wheel of his car at a traffic light in the middle of an unnamed large city, the attack thus accompanied by a thunderous chorus of car horns and hollering, intensifying the sense of some terrible pestilence raining down on the masses from an angry god. The disease goes airborne, and we follow a chain of others who catch it: the thief who steals the first blind man’s car (played a little too obviously mercenary by McKellar), the doctor who treats the first blind man (Mark Ruffalo), the patients who shared the doctor’s waiting room with the first blind man (Alicia Braga’s tough, dignified prostitute, Danny Glover’s one-eyed wise man), and so on. Following the measures decided upon by a panicked government (helmed by Sandra Oh), the blind are quarantined, and much of what follows plays out in the characters’ increasingly decrepit confinement.

Saramago’s formally rigorous prose style, with its extensive, multi-page paragraphs with scant punctuation, serves Blindness more perfectly than any of his other novels because, with so few signifiers to help break up dialogue, you actually feel sort of blind while reading it, trying to keep track of who’s talking, depending largely on the nuances of their individual printed voices. Since McKellar’s script resigns itself to simply dramatizing the novel’s action and does little to evoke its refrain of philosophizing and consideration of motives, Meirelles, perhaps as a countermeasure, seems to be trying to build up a like sense of blindness in the viewer through the repeated use of rack focus, white-outs, and the blurring of the frame’s edges. Yet the white-outs look uninterestingly synthetic—imagine if that “milky whiteness” were evoked by using actual milk!—and the strategy feels like an affectation, partly because it makes no sense as a way of creating a subjective point of view: the characters are either blind or not blind, never anything in between. At the same time, the entire visual world of Blindness is so cold and steely, filtered so as to suck all warmth out, that there’s no sense of the richness of the visual world that’s been stolen from the victims, no nostalgia either suggested or displayed that might pierce the emotions.

Over the course of Blindness the quarantined exhibit both the most base and vile of human tendencies—Saramago’s Marxist leanings can be detected here in the pathetic trading of food for utterly material goods—and the most ennobling and moral. The hero of the story is the doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore), the sole character to retain her sight, a fact she wisely holds secret. In a journey not unlike those of other characters that Moore has played over the years, she seems initially to be fairly vacuous and only through crisis reveals herself as resourceful, maternal, valiant and wily—though this transformation feels a matter of course, rarely becoming something we’re able to identify with. So on one hand, Meirelles is trying, unsuccessfully, to put us in his characters’ shoes, while on the other hand the characters, each of them as anonymous as the world they inhabit, fail to assume the specificities and interior lives that might draw us to them. Where literature, which only need supply the data it desires and nothing more, can function quite well in a world without specifics, it is a tremendous challenge to create a movie, particularly one shot on location, that exists in an everyworld full of everymen.

I can’t help but wonder if the movie might have worked better if Meirelles simply opted to maintain a detached, clinical approach, a la Michael Haneke in the similarly inexplicable apocalypse wrought in his underseen Time of the Wolf, allowing us to gradually develop our own empathies through a distinctive, vivid, stark visual world in which trauma and negotiation play out fully. Indeed, how oddly appropriate it might have been if the perspective through which we watched Blindness unfold was strictly observational.

Boys to Men: Cidade dos Homens

Dead End Hill, the rather in- auspiciously named favela that provides the setting for much of City of Men, is a ram- shackle maze of post-urban life where anarchy and violence are indistinguishable from the banalities of everyday existence. In this grimly alluring slum of Rio de Janeiro, a city that still resembles some seaside paradise if you squint a little and regard it from a safe distance, violent death is at once terrifyingly unpredictable and a visitor so regular as to deserve its own table setting. In one of City of Men’s many memorable scenes, a conversation between two men is interrupted by the sounding of a single gunshot somewhere nearby. The men look at each other and pause for just a moment, as though waiting for more, before one matter-of-factly says the other, “One less.”

This scene gives the impression that City of Men, a sequel of sorts to Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s 2002 film City of God, as well as a feature-length follow-up to the Brazilian television series of the same name, is a film corroded with cynicism. Yet City of Men, while plunging the viewer into an infernal milieu –one representative of the sort that more and more of the world is sliding toward– finally employs despair and chaos as a method of putting the persistence of hope in greater relief. City of God drew much of its abundant exhilaration and grotesquerie from the fact that the vicious gangsters inhabiting its streets were mostly still kids; in City of Men, which Meirelles co-produced, the boys that survived the previous film are now growing into adults, and, while plagued with even more cause for resignation or madness, some of them endeavour to forge new lives for themselves and the families they’re already beginning to create. The final scene elegantly evokes their baby steps toward a brighter future.

In a rapid, rhythmical sequence of cross-cuts that set the tone for what’s to come, the story opens, somewhat confusingly at first, by introducing Dead End Hill’s dominant, heavily-armed gang, led by the Madrugadão (Jonathan Haagensen, whose deep, puffy eyes and broad face mirror the brooding handsomeness of Benicio Del Toro), and two pals each on the cusp of official manhood, the charming, thick-bodied Ace and the boyishly handsome, more innocent Wallace (Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha, both of whom played roles in City of God). Ace already has a wife and son he feels far from ready for. So oblivious to parental obligation is Ace that he actually leaves his toddler son at the beach. Wallace meanwhile searches for his own father, a man sufficiently disreputable for Wallace’s family to refuse to provide even his first name.

Co-written by director Paolo Morelli, who helmed several episodes of the series, and Elena Soarez, the film is as smartly informed by the burdens and legacies of fathers and sons as Soarez’s script for House of Sand was by the innate links between mothers and daughters. Around the same time that gang warfare breaks out in Dead End Hill, approximately half-way through the story, Wallace tracks down his dad begins a tentative relationship, one soon fraught with the revelations of his dad’s blood-soaked past and ongoing criminal activities. In a plot twist that effectively echoes classical myth, the father’s history of violence runs concurrent with that of Ace’s father, and the lifelong friends become the inheritors of a shared past of horror and tragic folly, events whose consequences threaten to determine their own futures darkly.

Not unlike the density of domiciles crammed into the hillside slum, City of Men crams an awful lot of narrative into 110 minutes, yet it does so fluidly, and often thrillingly, with a masterful interweaving of flashbacks that flesh out the present and sometimes intriguingly contradict the spoken testaments given by those who lived through the past. Morelli doesn’t infuse the film with quite the same level of stylistic flourish that Meirelles brought to City of God, but he comes pretty close, particularly in the way his camerawork conveys a striking sense of the Hill’s vertical labyrinth. What’s more, Morelli is telling a story that, with all due respect to City of God, greatly surpasses its predecessor in sheer heart. In tracing the geometries of genes, family names, and social determinism, City of Men builds to a tremendously moving series of climaxes. It might be too much to expect a third film in this cycle to be as great, but I’d be more than happy to see them give it a whirl.