Blink, the new film from the team behind 2022 Oscar-winner Navalny, justifies its existence from the start; a documentary about children losing their vision demands nothing less than the treatment of a visual medium. Mia, Colin, and Laurent, three of the four children of Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier, have retinitis pigmentosa, a rare condition that will result in them losing their sight at a young age. Upon learning of their diagnosis, Lemay and Pelletier decide to fill their children’s memory with images, spending a year taking them around the world, completing a bucket list of experiences. From playing soccer with locals in faraway places to befriending dogs in Nepal, the family embarks on their mission to travel to several countries on nearly every continent.
Given the film’s foundational material, the narrative it follows is inherently sad, but directors Daniel Roher and Edmund Stenson effectively balance this looming melancholy with the vibrant joy of lived experience. Blink moves well beyond the template of simplistic tearjerker, and instead offers viewers a surprisingly layered saga that allows for the family’s everyday to take center stage. We see Mia’s quiet determination, Colin’s reserved nature, and Laurent’s lively curiosity as they navigate not only new cultures and sights, but also the reality of their condition and their dwindling capacity to perceive the glories around them. But yet another intriguing layer is added when the film focuses on Leo, the only child not diagnosed with the disease. As the eldest son, Leo takes on a protective role, yet he also grapples with the knowledge that he alone will retain his vision, an enforced solitude forever separating him from his siblings. It’s in this nuanced instinct toward zooming out in pursuit of the full spectrum of this family’s experience that Blink proves most moving, demonstrating deep care for its subjects rather than any concerning itself only with the conditioned emotional desires of an audience.
Visually, there is considerable potential given the film’s conceit. Curiously, then, Blink does not prove to be especially striking, but this actually serves a purpose. The film’s cinematography, though by no mean’s ugly, often looks to mirror the experience of the children, individuals who can’t perceive the world in the vibrant detail that others might. There are, of course, moments of natural beauty, but Roher and Stenson likewise here display necessary restraint, refusing to devalue the film’s emotional core in order to produce a slideshow of pretty photography, instead utilizing the medium in pursuit of the empathetically experiential. And so, what ultimately allows Blink to land with the impact that it does is the way it embraces ambiguity. While the film clearly celebrates the dual powers of memory and of living in the moment, it resists the urge either romanticize its subjects’ futures or wallow in the despair of their circumstance. Instead, it acknowledges the darkness that must come without losing sight of the beauty of the present.
DIRECTOR: Daniel Roher & Edmund Stenson; DISTRIBUTOR: National Geographic Documentary Films; IN THEATERS: October 4; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 24 min.
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