QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
In the opening scene of Blindsight, a middle-aged woman asks a little girl: “do you want to hug grandma?”. This is at a family gathering that is not only a birthday party for the unseen grandmother, but is shown from her point-of-view. There follows an impressionistic montage of home video footage and old black-and-white photos – a nostalgic family portrait that is also a kaleidoscope of distorted memories.
Issues of perspective, memory and identity are key to Adrian Sitaru’s Blindsight, where the key is in the title. Much of the rest of the film is shown from the point-of-view – complete with blinks à la Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2010) – of Laura (Ioana Flora), whose amnesia, resulting from a traumatic accident, has left her feeling estranged from her husband Ovidiu (Bogdan Albulescu), sister Simona (Cosmina Stratan), future brother-in-law Sabin (András Buzási) and young son Andrei (Filip Cioc), all of whom she no longer recognises as her loved ones. Similarly we hear that Laura herself is no longer recognised by her own Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother. Meanwhile Andrei’s congenital blindsight has him increasingly unable to see at all, and having to piece together his experiences from other sensory stimuli and intuition. As Simona expressly discusses the importance of context for the comprehension and full appreciation of art, it is clear that this is a film concerned with the construction of reality from partial evidence and sometimes restricted, fragmentary or unreliable perceptions.
Laura reluctantly accompanies Ovidiu, Simona, Sabin, Andrei and the family dog Leggy on a boat trip to Turkey, ostensibly to get Andrei the surgery that he needs, although the precise nature of their mission on this journey keeps changing. Along the way, Laura discovers a stowaway hiding in the small vessel’s hold – the refugee Katerina (Virginia Rusu), desperate to find her missing parents in Turkey. Much as Laura is alienated from everyone else by her faulty memory, Katerina is isolated linguistically, fluent in her native Ukrainian but not knowing any Romanian, so that she is able to communicate with this family only through Laura in the broken Serbian that is their only common tongue, even as other characters in the film speak Turkish, English and Hungarian.
Katerina has another bond with Laura: for the film is shown entirely through Laura’s eyes until the moment that Katerina arrives, at which point the perspective repeatedly shifts from one to the other, seeming to link these two strangers more closely, while Katerina looks for her lost parents and Laura struggles with her missing sense of maternity. Their conditions oddly dovetail, even as this family’s cross-border negotiations, though initially presented with a studious naturalism, become ever more surreal and glitchy, bewildering even more the already confused Laura. “I don’t understand what these people want from me”, she complains forlornly – and the more these strange adventures in foreign lands unfold, offering opportunities to indulge in all manner of illicit couplings and wish-fulfilment escapism, the more Laura just longs to be back home and left alone. Meanwhile they are all headed for a tunnel – the same tunnel glimpsed in some of the home movie flashbacks that regularly punctuate the film – which seems to be the seat of Laura’s trauma, as well as the source of her present tunnel vision.
The original Romanian title of Sitaru’s film is Piatră Foarfecă Hârti, literally “rock, paper, scissors”, suggesting less the blinkered perspectives of Blindsight than a game of infinitely, frustratingly extendible variations, but where the rules are ultimately fixed. Laura herself is being forced to play a game in which she has the illusion of freedom, even as her agency is greatly constrained within existing parameters programmed by others. As she explores the deep dysfunction and sorrow – of which she is the cold heart – in her broken family, she travels in circles making little real progress, until reaching an endpoint that is all at once thought-provoking and utterly blindsiding. This provides a new context which will have you wanting to rewatch the whole o(d)dyssey all over again with fresh, unblinking eyes wider open to pick up every bittersweet nuance of unresolved loss and impossible longing.
Blindsight just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
