Blind Loves

“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 (Scent of a Woman) but certainly nothing quite like this. Take a look – and savour your ability to do so.