There is a humorous moment somewhere past the halfway mark of Blind where the film’s blind narrator, Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), watches television and comments that it is the one activity that is the same whether one is blind or not. “You realize how unnecessary the pictures are,” she remarks.
It’s a longstanding criticism of (at least some) TV and a good joke, but it’s also writer-director Eskil Vogt’s self-congratulatory audience address. “Look at my film,” he seems to be saying, “my editing patterns ensure that the pictures are vital.”
So they are. Blind takes place almost entirely in the mind of Ingrid, as is made clear by the presence of her voiceover, by the laptop visible in the frame whenever the ostensible story is interrupted or when she narrates and in the film’s extensive use of graphic matches. Ingrid is writing about what her husband may be doing behind her back, and save for the ending, we are treated to a mostly straightforward narrative that operates on two easily distinguished levels, something that would not be clear to the viewer who knows not what to make of mise-en-scene and editing. Vogt’s film is not like the TV Ingrid watches; it demands people think about the film’s cuts and images to piece together the film’s narrative and thematic meaning. Blind has a great deal of plot—mostly about a pair of philandering men (the second, not the first, is Ingrid’s husband) and their fetishes, but also Ingrid’s difficulty adjusting to day-to-day activity, from playing records to cleaning spills—and it features a completely different story about a lonely, creative woman struggling to make sense of a world from which she has been suddenly cut off.
The plot of this side story is not much more than it appears to be, a representation of Ingrid’s fears, loneliness, codependency and loss of control all displaced according to tried-and-true psychoanalytic principles (fears are manifested in how she imagines her husband’s story to end, codependency is sublimated as his fetish, the blind woman of Ingrid’s story becomes a stand-in for herself and her lack of control, etc.). It’s a reasonably well-told film-within-a-film, funny and playful in its narrative and bifurcated structure. The same can be said for Vogt’s film, a fitting parallel given that Ingrid’s anxieties double as a metaphor for filmmaking (or really, creativity of any sort).
Regardless of which level of narrative Blind is operating on at a given moment, its world is remarkably lived-in. Vogt places the laptop to tip off viewers and Ingrid fills the apartments of her characters with books and records that rarely get the “I’m important!” close-up but linger in the frame long enough for viewers to take notice. If Vogt utilizes the joke about television to praise his own work and that of his collaborators—namely cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis and editor Jens Christian Fodstad—he has at least earned it.
But while this formal playfulness makes Blind an engaging watch, the film does not approach past masterpieces that take place largely in the head of their protagonists. While the overwhelming majority of films would pale in comparison to Last Year at Marienbad or Memories of Underdevelopment, it is worth noting a central difference those films have from Blind; namely, that they contain an “openness,” for lack of a better word, that this film lacks. Blind tells you too plainly what it is doing, and its script is focused on stories and characters that are not especially engaging on their own, which makes the film more admirable than loveable. It is clever, and effectively so, but its effectiveness and its cleverness disguise that the film is working with a limited metaphor that Vogt—who has also just missed greatness with his scripts for Joachim Trier, particularly Oslo, August 31st—refuses to complicate or interrogate. Great works of art question themselves and their own systems of representation and meaning-making, and one method, which Vogt also employs here, is the use of analogues. What distinguishes Blind from better works that use the same technique is that those other works often force audiences to see how the analogue is false, limited, or otherwise an imperfect match.
Marienbad is stacked with “reference failures,” beginning with the title itself (Marienbad hardly figures into the film, and when it does, it’s in a list of other places the protagonists may have been two years ago and digressions that replicate the split between director Alain Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet; Vladimir Nabokov uses chessboards in The Defense and butterflies and nature in The Gift to examine how writing and art are both comparable to and unique from other forms of creativity or problem-solving; the best directors with a “theatrical” style—think Ingmar Bergman—litter their film with distinctly “cinematic” moments or create artist-characters whose art is separate from their own (most memorably, Bergman’s Persona is about a stage actor), distinctions not lost on the filmmaker. Vogt is less interested in the nuances of the creativity of a blind writer than he is in directly equating it with his own craft. It makes for a film you watch once for the journey and then, after you know where it’s going, watch again to discern more completely. Nobody has discerned Marienbad or Pale Fire (as if a work of art ought necessarily to be sorted out and “explained”).
To return to Vogt’s own analogue, his film is not like TV, where the pictures mean nothing. Instead, Blind has the opposite problem: his pictures “mean” all too clearly, thereby limiting any nuance, intricacy and interpretation on the part of the viewer. One can’t fault Blind for failing to set up a coherent system, as it is commendably effective in teaching its viewer how to watch it. Rather, one should fault it because the rewards are too slight.