Shedding Light on Blindness

Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Blindness makes me even more excited to see it than I was when I first heard they were taking the Saramago opus to the screen, although it also touches on one of the novel's impossible obstacles:

Maybe it’s because, like everyone else, she doesn’t have a name. That is also true of Saramago’s fable; just because namelessness is a commonplace in modern fiction, however (see Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” for its most terrifying use), does not mean that it translates to the screen. Any attempt to blank out movie characters—after all, we know the names of the actors playing them—feels both precious and, in the case of Meirelles’s film, counterintuitive. If everyone were struck blind, names would surely become more, not less, crucial: as one means of identification was lost, we would grasp eagerly at another.

I'm also intrigued to see Gael García Bernal as the bad guy. It's been years since I read the book, but I remember him being a vividly evil dude, which is something García's never been.