CHOSEN TO open the Cannes Film Festival this year, Blindnessis one of those movies that seemed to have all the ingredients for a prestige production but amounts to substantially less than the sum of its parts. Featuring a well-regarded international cast, it's the third feature from Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian director of City of Godand The Constant Gardener, and based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramango.
The theme is no less than the end of civilization as we know it, and the screenplay is by Canadian actor-writer-director Don McKellar, whose own 1998 film Last Nightmined generally similar territory with greater urgency and impact.
Blindnessis set in an unnamed city where people go blind in an instant. The first is a man who's driving home from work when it happens. The next is his wife, and then the doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who treats him.
The condition is described as "white blindness" or, as one victim puts it, like "swimming in milk". The doctor's wife (Julianne Moore) is among the minority immune to the contagion, but she pretends to be blind so that she can care for him when the government places victims under quarantine at a squalid, disused sanatorium. The building has an emergency phone, but calls are never answered, and the inmates are treated as society's rejects.
The film is most effective in observing the erosion of moral codes and the primal behaviour to which the victims resort in their desperation for personal survival.
Ruffalo turns in a performance that is curiously dull and remote - rather like the film itself, with its lack of dramatic tension and emotional engagement. Moore's characteristically committed portrayal goes some way towards sustaining the drama as she captures her character's resilience against all the odds.
**
Directed by Fernando Meirelles. Starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal, Danny Glover, Alice Braga, Yusuke Iseya, Don McKellar 15A cert, lim release, 121 min
