Not (alas) an adaptation of the first-rate Dick Francis thriller of the same name, this Australian film tells of an extremely odd romantic triangle: a blind-from-birth photographer, the ristorante kitchen worker whom he recruits as a friend and helper (to describe his photos to him), and the blind man's improbably attractive cleaning lady who loves him unrequitedly and ends up fighting him for the affections of his new chum. The blind man's special obsession — the difficulty of trusting other people and the easiness of their deceiving him — is a universal ailment, only here intensified. The situation in truth is interesting enough that we want to know more about the people than we ever get told. (How does the blind man support himself? Doesn't the cleaning lady know anyone else? — that kind of thing.) Certain "inside" details of the blind man's existence help to sensitize us, or to sensitize the filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse, to a much-neglected cinematic area: sound. (The dripping shower head, the tinkling bracelet that announces the comings-and-goings of a harried waitress, the hum of a fluorescent light, the changing pitch as a wineglass gets filled to the rim.) But the "inside" story on blindness can perhaps better be appreciated, more accurately and undistractedly appreciated, on the page than on the screen: cf. the curtly titled Henry Green novel (characteristically as curtly titled as any Dick Francis novel), Blindness. With Hugo Weaving, Russell Crowe, Genevieve Picot. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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