A Cannes Director’s Fortnight and Karlovy Vary selection screening in TIFF’s non-fiction Reel to Reel program without fanfare, the Slovak hybrid doc Blind Loves is a lovely surprise. Music video director turned first time feature maker Juraj Lehotsky tracks four blind persons at various ages and life stages and, in a series of vignettes that blend observed fact with what appear to be staged recreations and dream-like fiction, offers an extremely intimate portrait of the navigation of personal relationships without sight.
The most in depth vignette centers on Peter, a middle aged piano teacher who sits with his ear to the TV “watching” skiing (he guesses the length of the jumps by counting the seconds between push off and landing) while his also-blind wife knits. At one point, Peter’s wife asks him to stand up so she can see how far her sweater-in-progress stretches over his “broad shoulders.” Peter sounds genuinely disappointed: “I thought I was slim.” This sly hint that Peter’s lifelong companion has a more intimate knowledge of his own body than he does is one of the more touching moments in a film filled with sneakily-presented touchstones of quiet devastation.
The Peter segment is also notable for its gloriously weird sojourn into fantasy territory. After narrating an imagined underwater adventure whilst playing his electric keyboard in his living room, Peter walks––fully clothed, with walking stick in hand––into the sea. In the space of a cut, he’s transported into a partially-animated under sea vision, where he calmly eats a sandwich while an octopus slinks towards him. Mostly live-action but processed to attain the feel of stop-motion animation, it plays like Melies in full color.
This segment comes relatively early in the film, and nothing that follows is as creatively daring or logically whacked-out. But while Lehotsky holds back in visual panache in his rendering of the remaining stories, each is deeply effecting without embellishment. Pregnant Elena frets that she’ll never see her child, and hopes that it’s born blind so that she and her husband will be able to impart their own lived wisdom. Teenage Zuzana loses herself in an online relationship, but worries that if she ever meets her boyfriend, he’ll reject her for being blind. Partially-sightless Monika’s parents don’t approve of her dating the fully-blind, Romanian Miro, and ask her to chose between him and her family. Miro, deeply in love at first blush, worries that if they part, they’ll both end up alone forever, and reasons that even if “Moni” doesn’t love him like he loves her, wouldn’t it be better for her to accept his affection than to live without love?
The organic melancholy that runs through each of these stories is balanced out by the overwhelming beauty of many of the images, and the subtle humor Lehotsky finds in the day to day, without ever either mocking or becoming too reverent. The scenes shot indoors at night are particularly exciting to look at, being that they’re largely shot with just a hint of light from a TV or a streetlamp shining through a window––a sign that whenever possible, the filmmaker sought to capture his subjects lives without altering their lifestyles. The most indelible image of the film, to me, comes late in the film. Peter and his wife attempt to clink champagne glasses in a room apparently lit only by the lights on a tiny Christmas tree. They slowly, carefully move their glasses together, in a gesture they’ve probably attempted a thousand times but have yet to perfect. On the first try, they miss, and then connect. It’s a laugh, it’s bittersweet, and it’s unassumingly gorgeous. And that’s a fair description of the whole of the movie.
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