I saw this film one day after having finished José Saramago’s book, which left a sustainable memory of long sentences, basic human living conditions – on several levels – and a sense of the contents taking place anywhere on the globe. A (contradictory, I know) modern timelessness. Laissez faire. The film does not fare as well as the book, I’ll say, but it’s quite OK. It tries. I liked the music and the way the acting was quite toned down. The washed-out colours were interesting. As a whole, entertaining yet too simple.

I really wanted to like Blindness and thought that it was a pretty safe bet with Fernando Meirelles who directed the heart wrenching “City of God”: as well as “The Constant Gardener”: , but it just didn’t work for me. For some reason I never connected with the characters and the film very much felt as if it was designed and constructed by a very large committee. While there are some nice visual touches, I kept thinking of other films that did the whole breakdown of society thing much better such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men . The large cast and the jumping around between the characters distanced me from what was happening and when a voice-over comes in later in the film, I was wondering how much longer the film was. While it does create the world with some interesting shooting and production design, it just wasn’t very compelling on a human level.