At the 2008 Cannes festival in May, a film premiered that hasn’t been covered much by the press. Starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, Blindness is the story of a society struck with an epidemic of blindness and the one seeing woman who must keep her ability a secret.

Blindness is based on the novel of the same name by Nobel-winning author José Saramago, who closely guarded film rights to his novel. He describes it as a “violent book about social degradation,” which he didn’t want to “fall into the wrong hands.” But director Fernando Meirelles was passionate about the project, so he sent his screenwriter and producer to convince the author to their side.

All of the actors, plus 700 extras, had to be trained on how to act blind. Actor Christian Duurvoort from Meirelles’ acclaimed film City of God had learned the mannerisms before, and so took on the task of training them.

You can watch the trailer here:

When the film was first screened for audiences in Toronto, an estimated fifty people walked out of the film early. Meirelles blamed a scene of sexual violence, which he included to be true to the novel, and shortened the scene to make it less brutal.

But why haven’t we heard of this movie? Despite the controversy, the reception of Blindess at Cannes was “tepid.” Wikipedia has a summary:

Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter described Blindness as “provocative” but “predictable cinema”, startling but failing to surprise. Honeycutt criticized the film’s two viewpoints: Julianne Moore’s character, the only one who can see, is slow to act against atrocities, and the behavior of Danny Glover’s character comes off as “slightly pompous”. Honeycutt explained, “This philosophical coolness is what most undermines the emotional response to Meirelles’ film. His fictional calculations are all so precise and a tone of deadly seriousness swamps the grim action.” Justin Chang of Variety described the film: “Blindness emerges onscreen both overdressed and undermotivated, scrupulously hitting the novel’s beats yet barely approximating, so to speak, its vision.” Chang thought that Julianne Moore gave a strong performance but did not feel that the film captured the impact of Saramago’s novel.

As someone who grew up reading books, nothing upsets me more than the idea of a book being badly translated to film. Despite all his hard work, Meirelles has fallen short.

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