I'm not such a big fan of movies with lots of raping! Except Midnight Express. And of course Ms. 45. (Buy it now!) I never did see that Irreversible with the infamous nine-minute Monica Belluci rape. (That is a really long time on screen.) So in Blindness, the new film by Fernando Meirelles, there is a bit too much raping for my taste. Your mileage may vary?

Succinct plot description: One by one, spreading person to person, people start going blind in a crowded urban place. Hence the title! Because it is clearly a contagion, folks going blind are isolated in an abandoned hospital of sorts. An early victim of blindness is an opthamologist (John Leguizamo! Oh my God MY MIND! I mean Mark Ruffalo!), whose wife (Julianne Moore!) for some reason does not go blind and yet she accompanies him into this institution. She is his seeing-eye lady!

The place fills up, particularly with trash, and, as will happen, people form little human societies. There being limited food and no medicine (scarcity v. need!) provided by the armed soldiers outside, an economy (exchange!) begins. There are no means of production of anything to be exchanged, so what do people have of value? First what they already have (in a sense, inheritance), and then bodies (activity).

So you can see how the raping begins.

This is a movie about socioeconomics, which honestly, is never that fun. Because every story about social exchange is a parable and a parable is always troublesome and/or dull.

Furthering the weirdness, this is really three movies: A movie about what happens with people going blind (that looks something like a thriller or a zombie flick, and isn't particularly great), a movie about the society of the blind in the institution—and then a movie about what happens after. It begins poorly and jerkily, and there are only so many times you can hear someone say "OMG I can't see!"

The middle section—the transactional one—is most engrossing and oppressing. (And enlivened by the fantastic Gael Garcia Bernal.) And then the end is ... timeless, in a way. By which I mean you have no sense of when or how this might end. There's no structure of action to hold it together: what do you do when your whole mini-society, the only way you now (suddenly) remember to live, comes completely apart? As you wait it out you start to understand recidivism and how people become jail lifers. So the movie floats off in a funny little way, after the raping is over, and there is nothing more at all with which to transact.