Blind

There’s an old adage that says when one sense is impaired, oth­ers will nat­u­ral­ly strength­en in their place. With this extreme­ly clever and per­cep­tive debut fea­ture, Eskil Vogt pro­pos­es that this apoc­ryphal phys­i­o­log­i­cal quirk shouldn’t be lim­it­ed to just the sens­es, but to imag­i­na­tion, intu­ition and philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tive. For no med­ical­ly cal­cu­la­ble rea­son, Ingrid (Ellen Dor­rit Petersen) one day begins to suf­fer from blur­ry vision in one eye.

By the time she’s in front of a doc­tor, both eyes are fogged up and she’s told that she will soon be blind. Her hus­band, Morten (Hen­rik Rafaelsen), is an archi­tect who appears to have nat­u­ral­ly adapt­ed to his wife’s prob­lems, though she sus­pects he may be cheat­ing on her. She wouldn’t know for cer­tain, hav­ing cho­sen to live out a clois­tered exis­tence, flit­ting around in their bright, airy pad. Yet this sit­u­a­tion of being unable to car­ry out sim­ple dai­ly tasks sets her imag­i­na­tion into over­drive, and she com­pen­sates for the dearth of stim­u­la­tion through alter­na­tive means.

If it sounds like a fair­ly cut-and-dried rela­tion­ship dra­ma in which a couple’s fideli­ty is test­ed by the ran­dom degra­da­tion of the body, it’s not, and props are due to Vogt for shun­ning melo­dra­ma at every pos­si­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty. Blind is a pre­dom­i­nant­ly affir­ma­tive por­tray­al of the sen­so­ri­ly deprived, more inter­est­ed in explor­ing the inner rather than the out­er life. Ingrid has to learn to accept that, say, mak­ing a cup of tea or heat­ing up a bowl of soup is no longer the reac­tive process it once was, but she doesn’t dwell on those dif­fi­cul­ties, instead focus­ing her atten­tions on the things she still can do well (and to reveal what those ​‘things’ are would be a major spoiler).

The Acad­e­my Awards set would like­ly remain unim­pressed with the film, as it posits the rad­i­cal notion that dis­abil­i­ty does not auto­mat­i­cal­ly result in either great suf­fer­ing or great for­tune — it banal­ly sits some­where in the mid­dle, and its depic­tion on screen requires a per­for­mance of awk­ward nuance rather than full-bore, over-learned theatrics.

Things become a lit­tle more com­plex when two oth­er char­ac­ters enter the fray, a dip­py Swede by the name of Elin (Vera Vitali) and a slight­ly cor­pu­lent porn addict named Einar (Mar­ius Kol­ben­stvedt). Ini­tial­ly, their inclu­sion in the sto­ry seems quite arbi­trary — were Ingrid able to see, you’d sus­pect that these were the folks she had been watch­ing all day from her apart­ment window.

When ful­ly con­tex­tu­alised, these char­ac­ters are what con­firms that Blind is not in any way a social real­ist doc­u­ment, but some­thing more exhil­a­rat­ing­ly meta­phys­i­cal. It’s a film about films, espous­ing the joys of fic­tion as a way to trans­port us into exot­ic locales, to see oth­er worlds and meet oth­er peo­ple with­out ever hav­ing to leave the dinky urban pris­ons we call apartments.