Blind Loves

“What super power would you have?” someone asks Zuzana in an internet chatroom. “To be invisible,” she replies. “To walk through walls and to read peoples minds…”

We get a taste of these wondrous gifts ourselves, courtesy of this beguiling and whimsical observational film by Slovak music video director Juraj Lehotsky. Shot over a five year period, the movie is a documentary which applies some fictional techniques – including some scripted scenes, and one especially startling fantasy sequence which it would be a shame to spoil here.

Don’t go imagining anything too dramatic, though, for the most part Lehotsky gives us a modest, close portrait of four blind people and their partners and loved ones, mostly going about their everyday lives: watching TV, cooking, decorating a Christmas tree…

These activities may sound banal, but there is something fascinating, even voyeuristic about seeing them accomplished by the sight-deprived. Feeling the Xmas lights for heat to check that they’re on, for instance – for some reason it matters. Or the throwaway comment that one woman makes about her husband’s “broad shoulders” (she’s knitting him a jumper). He’s disappointed, he says, he always thought of himself as slim.

At the same time, we get a powerful sense of the domestic intimacy these couples share, their hopes and fears – none of them different from our own, of course, but nevertheless magnified by their condition. Peter is a music teacher and a pianist, happily married to Iveta. Miro, on the other hand, is desperately courting Moni, a partially blind woman in the same village, but whose parents don’t approve. Elena is pregnant, and wonders whether her child will see – and if social services will allow them to stay together. Zuzana is still a teenager, looking for her first love.

Exquisitely photographed and edited, Blind Loves is a visual delight – but it’s not remotely condescending towards its blind protagonists. On the contrary, Lehotsky has crafted a precious tribute to these ordinary people’s intuitive ability to feel.

The cinema of blindness is a fairly narrow field, for obvious reasons I guess. I can think of one or two marvelous non-fiction films (Werner Herzog’s Land Of Silence And Darkness for instance, the recent Blind Sight, and Black Sun) and then a few thrillers (most famously Wait Until Dark), the long-running Zatoichi series, and the odd sentimental drama (The Scent of a Woman) but certainly nothing quite like this. Take a look – and savour your ability to do so.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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