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Blind is an exciting film. It’s got everything – great writing, engaging performances, and incredibly dynamic cinematography. The unsettling narrative, which is based around a recently blinded woman’s attempts to come to terms with her condition, unexpectedly manages to pull itself together in the end. When you go to see it, don’t find out too much about it first. Inventiveness and surprise are a large part of what makes it so enjoyable.
Director Eskil Vogt uses the sensory limitation of his main character, Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), to highlight the sensual possibilities of film and its methods of manipulating an audience. We share her heightened awareness of sound, and her most basic movements call our attention to how our senses inform our world. For Ingrid, something as simple as making tea becomes an experience fraught with tension, and the careful, concentrated performance from Petersen highlights the particular ways in which Ingrid must use her remaining senses to compensate for her blindness.
Textures of sound, image and story overlap and jar with one another. A meditative, calm tone is established at the beginning with the use of close-up shots of nature and a slow, informative voice-over which talks the audience through the process of visualising a tree. As the film progresses, the cinematography becomes more experimental, and a range of unusual shots complement the increasingly fractured narrative.
The plot of Blind is wacky, intense and a little ridiculous. It pulls you along and then stops short of where you thought it was going, a situation which is exacerbated by the lack of knowledge the characters have about their own circumstances. This feeling of uncertainty and tension is developed via a study of two activities: touching and watching. Two of the four central characters, Ingrid and Einar, are struggling with an aspect of sensory deprivation: she can’t see, and he can’t touch. He likes to watch (porn, lots of it), and she’s afraid of being watched. Their frustrations become obsessive and alienating. When she sits alone at home during the day, she imagines her husband sneaking back from work and sitting on the couch, watching her silently. The discrepancies between Ingrid’s imagined reality and reality itself (a loose term here) provide the film with its focus, and juxtaposing these spheres constitutes the primary narrative device.
At times this film is disturbing and uncomfortable, but nestled in the midst of the anxiety, porn and blindness are a few strikingly tender scenes and a fair bit of humour. The bedroom scenes between Ingrid and her husband are beautifully acted by Petersen and Henrik Rafaelsen. Humour is found in the clumsy behaviour of the characters and the sadistic playfulness of Ingrid. Meditating on the pressure she feels to prove her worth to her husband, she compares herself to “the blind Frenchman who had to blink a whole book to regain the status he’d had as a fashion editor”. The film manages to explore dark and sadistic psychological territory while retaining a respect for its characters’ humanity that makes watching it an ultimately optimistic experience.
Blind isn’t perfect, marred as it is by an inexplicably weird ending. It is however, exceptional, and its use of film’s audio-visual possibilities to tell a story will reawaken the most jaded audience member’s interest in the medium.
