Blind Sun

Good atmosphere until you get bored, very beautiful filmmaking, an interesting POV, but doesn't deliver.

In the end, it's just another artsy film with less to say that it's director thinks.

A slow burn. I dare say it because here it's not a metaphorical cliché, it's the actual plot of this indie!

Set in Greece in a near dystopic future, we follow Ashraf Idriss (Palestinian actor Ziad Bakri), an immigrant hired to house-sit a villa for the summer, ensuring its safety amidst rising hooliganism and brutality whilst personally suffering the oppression that attempts to counter the tense lawlessness of a heat-wave-baked world increasingly deprived of its primary resource: water.

Sure enough, the standoffish Ashraf faces increasing threats, scared to be in the villa and afraid to act after having lost his papers to a racist cop, but what's a real menace and what results out of a slowly baking brain?

Told through careful cinematography, editing, and sensibility that lean towards art-house minimalism, this first-time feature for Joyce A. Nashawati marks this Lebanese director as someone possessing tremendous flair for the deeply nuanced yet sharp socio-political allegory, the kind that lets one get away with more style then story.

The horror classification given by some (see Shudder.com) is believable. The menace that looms throughout genuinely takes hold midway and brings us to chilling moments, both of real fear and psychological unease. There's an unsettling atmosphere that reigns, set both by an intriguing soundtrack and a keen exploitation of light in establishing either the threat of a sun-drenched world or of those lurking in shadows.

A tense, unnerving visual treat with a disturbing end, my only complaint is that it's often too easy to forget just how water-deprived and hot a world Ashraf faces and it's never quite justified why he seems to suffer more than all. Watching his "burnout" is engrossing, but we never fully embark on his ride that leads to his solution, albeit we certainly do feel his relief afterwards (up to a point) for, though he's hardly the most likable and pet- friendly of fellows, he does earn our sympathy.

Well worth a watch!

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.

Despite the atmospheric premise, Blind Sun never picks up speed. It's a slow burner but never gets to a point where things get interesting. It's such a missed opportunity because everything including the hot yellow / orange sunlight is set to make everyone paranoid. But no. Like other "deep-thinking" films, many questions are left unanswered and paranoia, anxiety and fear are replaced by boredom and annoyance. It is not quite a disaster but too many, if not all things are too random and make little or no sense. The ending... well, do not expect too much! However, I am glad that this film never turned out to be a politically charged propaganda film for climate activists because they never deal with the real problem - overpopulation.

What's happening here ? We all saw the same film that pretty much wasn't a film that deserved even a critic !!!!! But No you got into the trouble to write what came to your mind just to praise something that was an absolute nothing !!!! You rated with a 7 to a10 ? Bravo to the cousins and batzanaki of the director also, you can come on Sunday to eat pastitzio with the family. And wear your shades because the sun is not the only one blind !