When Slumdog Millionaire
triumphed at the Academy
Awards, turning Hollywood’s
Kodak Theatre into a joyous
British-Bollywood party,
there was a rush to judgment
about the glowing health
of independent cinema.
With its eight Oscars and
poised to hit the $100-million
box-office mark in North
America, Slumdog is evidence
the indie scene is thriving,
according to gushing TV pundits.
They are wrong.
Slumdog is the exception,
a lightning strike. The rule is
that almost all other indie films
— with Fernando Meirelles’
Blindness as a remarkable and
frustrating indicator — are
struggling. Truth is, the indie
scene is in dire straights.
Even Slumdog courted disaster.
Before it won the Peoples
Choice Award at the Toronto
Film Festival last September,
British director Danny Boyle
thought his humble fantasy about
romance and squalor in Mumbai
“would go straight to DVD!”
Blindness, a searing drama
about the human condition,
might as well have done so.
Despite opening the 2008 Cannes
filmfest and playing in Toronto,
and despite being filmed in
English, this international co-
production from Canada, Brazil
and Japan suffered a disastrous
theatrical run. It earned $3.4
million in North
America, and just $18.8
million worldwide.
Now the Blindness
DVD is available.
Alliance Films did a
splendid job with it in
Canada. This is a two-
disc Special Edition
here (Miramax issued a
one-disc U.S. version).
The special edition
extras are first rate.
They show how
serious, ambitious and
penetrating the film is, even if few
people have seen it yet. Using an
pan-global blindness epidemic
as a metaphor, the film explores
the nature of the beast within.
Those afflicted are forced into
a prison internment. Societal
order breaks down. Rebuilding
that society into a new order
becomes a monumental task,
one person at a time. Blindness
ends in cautious optimism.
Julianne Moore, who co-
stars as someone immune to
the blindness virus, says the
film asks huge questions: “Who
are we and how responsible
are we for one another, and
what we do every day?”
Her character, as the
only sighted person
interned, becomes
the representative
of the viewers. Blind
characters are played
by an international
cast, among them
Mark Ruffalo, Maury
Chaykin, Gael Garcia
Bernal, Alice Braga,
Sandra Oh, Yusuke
Iseyo and Toronto
actor-filmmaker Don
McKellar, who wrote
the Blindness screenplay and
gleefully plays the odious Thief.
Blindness is based on a novel
by Portuguese writer Jose
Saramago, the radical leftist who
won a Nobel Prize. Saramago
is famous for refusing to let
Hollywood option his books.
He relented when two men
from the Canadian indie scene
— McKellar and producer
Niv Fichman — courted him
in the Canary Islands.
“I didn’t want the book to fall
into the hands of someone who
would take advantage of the
copyright and just do whatever
they wanted with it,” Saramago
says in a rare interview on the
DVD. But he was impressed
with the Canadians. “They were
two normal people, not some
arrogant cinema tyrants.”
Meirelles, famous for his
slumdog film, City of God,
was hired to direct. Ironically,
Saramago had earlier refused
him the rights to Blindness. “I
keep reading the book,” Meirelles
says, “and I keep finding different
perspectives to see this story.”
The special edition DVD
includes a 55-minute making-
of doc, Vision of Blindness, and
seven minutes of deleted scenes.
You can also watch the film with
The Seeing Eye option, which
includes 34 minutes of extra video
footage of how the film was shot,
primarily in Sao Paolo, Brazil,
and at a former prison for the
criminally insane in Guelph, Ont.
This is Blindness.
Now you can see.
bruce.kirkland@sunmedia.ca
