Gender blindness Emil Vogt’s debut feature-length work, which has already become famous at Sundance – a prize for her work as a screenwriter, at the Berlinale – the Label Europa Cinemas prize, and even received the FIPRESCI award in Krakow; is a chamber picture of new European style, telling the story of one blind girl and her mental relationship with the outside world in a new “dark” environment.
The main character, full of fears, despair and emptiness, in almost futile attempts to recreate previously visible images, enclosing herself in the silence of home walls, writes a book where familiar and unfamiliar characters climb into these very images, through the prism of acquired obsessive experiences, then being the personification of her alter ego, with hidden and actual desires, and even a representative of the gender department of the psyche, building various assumptions about her appearance and environment, but especially about her husband. The biggest fear is ignorance: she doesn’t know what he’s doing right now—whether he’s checking his emails or texting his mistress, sitting in a shadow in the house and watching her, or at work, or maybe somewhere else, or someone else. She doesn’t even know what the apartment looks like.
The author, with the help of mixed flashbacks and flash forwards, and sometimes almost crossing the sura line, draws us a true picture of the imagination, and it is a certain, confidently female, quite precisely advanced psychological aspects and placing the necessary accents. The lost ability to visualize objects brings to the fore the same superficial problems of philistineism, appearance, social position, multilevel, uncertain and unreasonable jealousy on the verge of hysteria.
Then, in an analogy, one comes to mind the comparison of blindness, a physical defect, with typical femina-signs, where in the fields of logic the boundaries of the real and the unreal are blurred, when premonitions, and more often the mere fruit of the work of the imagination, so confidently change places with what is actually happening. Blindness is the basis of the negative side of female gender, as a figurative physical deficiency and a factor leading to hysteria and various personality disorders, the panacea of which, apparently, is hidden only in pregnancy, as in a potential change in perception and attitude.