Flying Blind

+Flying Blind (Katarzyna +Klimkiewicz, UK, 2012, 93 min)

     Every film festival offers a dud or two. For me the 2013 +Palm Springs International Film Festival dud was this erotic mystery.

     Helen +McRory plays the 40-something aerospace engineer who has two months to lead her team to solve a Drone design problem or they lose a major contract and all their careers will be ruined. So of course she falls in love with a 24-year-old Algerian Muslim engineering student who’s really a cabbie (Najib Oudghiri), enjoys several erotic encounters with him, wards off growing suspicions about his politics and honesty, goes to pieces, breaks up with him, solves the Drone thing, then reunites with him until he’s arrested and deported. All while making the deadline.

     From all that implausibility the plot buckles. You can't believe a word of this film. The brilliant scientist is incredibly stupid. She ignores compelling evidence. There are no signs her affair involves love, just eroticism. The lovers barely speak to each other. The film's title excuses but doesn't alleviate her implausibility. That's too bad, because in a more thoughtful and responsible script her intriguing character might have worked.

     Worse, the script tosses off serious issues --  e.g., the scientist’s responsibility for the weaponization of his material, racial profiling, the importing of jihadism -- without examining any of them. The film gets by with a list of important topics, sans comprehension or exploration. The Algerian hero gets a speech about the civilian casualties from Drone attacks, but nobody mentions the civilian deaths caused by the terrorists the Drone targets. The heroine makes no argument against the man's charge that she's to blame for the military's use of her science. The film is not just simplistic; it encourages the viewer's narrowness and naivety.  
      Another Palm Springs entry, Marco Bellocchio's Dormant Beauty (see later filing), reminds us how a more thoughtful and insightful filmmaker will treat a complex issue -- with appreciation of its complexity and no pat solution. 

      At the end of Flying Blind we have been led to assume the suspicious lover is an innocent abused. But we’ve been given no evidence. His innocence is a plot device, not organic to the material. Nor has the heroine been given any solid proof that the young man with the suspicious, armed friends wants her and not her military secrets. By this film, suspicious behaviour should lead us to infer innocence. That is irresponsible beyond story-telling. 

      So, the pretense to seriousness, a few semi-explicit sex scenes, some current headline tags -- I’d call this an exploitation film, impure and simple-minded.