Blind Sun

Blind sun is as close to a thriller as Wong Kar Wai's "2046" to a sci-fi movie (which it is, but hey!). It is surely 'old school', if only for the high quality. To me, Blind Sun is all about the sun- sterilized atmosphere. The settings are unsettling: useless luxury that becomes a burden. I felt the space capsule isolation. Think of The Shining, Alien or even more the Cube. None of the horror, though. The angst comes from the urge to return over and over to a hostile chamber (to survive or to be doomed?). The sun is hostile, water is a dangerous precious (everything but purifying), the secondary characters seem to have all a dual nature: mundane and symbolic, walking antonomasias of who they are. From universal, to stereotyped, to grotesque. They may as well exist without a given name. In this visually amazing picture I found the pace very different from the cinematography I am getting used to lately. Here the film plays in 1970 terms, like an early Peter Weir or a gore-less Fulci (a hint of the latter accidentally suggested by an occasional hairdo). Every frame is deliberately beautiful, but it is a bitter beauty, the sort you experience smelling wild herbs. To take it in, you will breath deeply and then you might find yourself totally into the story like a compassionate but helpless passerby, or the opposite, obliviously distanced from the scene like this sun. This sun is a fierce star and this Earth is a planet with a toxic atmosphere and with an impossiblé gravity; returning to the infested capsule really seems the only way to buy time. A past hardship that is not even hinted at is immediately inferred, and makes the unthinkable almost tolerable.