(1) Rather than dismiss or criticize these changes, Saramago celebrated them. The spoken language shifts from Portuguese to predominantly English, an unnamed but identifiably European city from the end of the twentieth century transforms into a twenty-first-century composite of North and South American cityscapes (Toronto, Sao Paulo, Montevideo), and an ensemble of internationally renowned actors embodies the originally nameless, specter-like characters. Although in many ways Meirelles's film directly translates Ensaio sobre a cegueira's prose to images, important differences exist. When the lights came on in the small Lisbon theater, the Nobel laureate judged Blindness "um grande filme" (LUSA).
Only a few days after Cannes, Meirelles travelled to Portugal to screen the film for Saramago. Critics repeatedly invoked the issue of fidelity (or bemoaned its lack), and El Confidencial's Alicia Garcia de Francisco was not alone in judging the cinematographic adaptation inferior to the written text. Despite their marked differences, the reviews found common ground in comparing Blindness to its source: Jose Saramago's novel, Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995). Responses were equally polarized in Spanish- and Portuguese-language newspapers: the Brazilian Globo celebrated Blindness as "talvez o filme do ano" (Pelli), but the Spanish El Confidencial complained that Meirelles's film was "menos sutil" and cruder than the story on which it was based (Garcia de Francisco). While The Guardian hailed the film as "elegant, gripping, and visually outstanding" (Bradshaw), The New York Times panned it as "nasty, brutish, and nowhere near short enough" (Dargis).
Fernando Meirelles's Blindness opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival to scattered applause and sharply divided reviews.
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