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BLINDED
5/10
UK
2004 (copyright date 2003) : Eleanor YULE : 91 mins
A heady brew
of modern farmhouse-gothic set in the wilds of Scotland, Blinded treads
familiar loamy turf with a fair measure of assurance. Making her feature
debut after a string of small-screen documentaries, writer-director Yule
harks back to literary sources: this is essentially the same tale told
in (among others) Zola's Therese Raquin then transplanted to America
in Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Wharton's Ethan
Frome. The basic set-up features a married couple mismatched in age
and temperament, who live in some remote dwelling. When a young, virile
newcomer arrives on the scene, passions are stirred with inevitably tragic
consequences.
Here the disruptive
outsider is abstract-sculptor Mike Hammershoi (Anders W Berthelsen), who's
fled his native Denmark because of unspecified, perhaps criminal events.
Seeking odd-job work in chilly Ayrshire, he's directed to the farm presided
over by blind Francis Black (Peter Mullan), a formidable, short-tempered
tyrant. Francis sets Mike to work disposing of old mechanical equipment
by throwing it into a seemingly bottomless sludge-pit. When Mike gradually
befriends Francis's much younger, sexually-repressed wife Rachel (Jodhi
May), long-dormant emotions are awakened...
 Yule
has said that she chose to call Mike "Hammershoi" as a reference
to a Danish painter of the same name, who specialised in the kind of gloomy
interior compositions reproduced here Jerry Kelly's digital-video cinematography.
Black's farmhouse is thus a dour zone of greys and pallid browns - it's
as if all colour and life had been leached out of the environment by Francis,
an angry black hole spewing out negative energy. This makes the film intriguing
to look at, while we remain attentive to the plot convolutions thanks
largely to the effectively contrasting performances by leads Mullan, Berthelsen
and May.
But the script
struggles to strike a workable balance between the fairytale/fable aspects
of the heady plot (we see a Hans Christian Andersen book lying around)
and the more mundane concerns of everyday practicality. This kind of mysterious,
deliberately overwrought melodrama is very hard to pull off in contemporary
settings, and it doesn't help that the pace is occasionally a little ponderous,
the dialogue a touch stilted. While the twists and turns of Blinded
may make psychological and allegorical sense, the film feels too implausibly
contrived, too schematic in its bitter ironies, for us to fully sympathise
with the characters' plight.
15th September,
2004
(seen 27th August : UGC Edinburgh : press show - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for our full coverage of the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival
by Neil
Young
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