Love Is Blind
2015 · 6m · UK
Directed by Dan Hodgson
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tense
Alice is surprised mid-assignation with her lover when her Deaf husband James returns home unexpectedly. She must simultaneously negotiate a reconciliation with her husband in sign language while conducting a shouted break-up conversation with her lover hidden upstairs — a farce built on the irony of literal and figurative blindness.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A farce in sign language and shouted English, Cannes Palme d'Or nominee. The premise is brilliant on paper — sign language with the husband, shouted breakup with the hidden lover. Six and a half minutes. Either the timing is perfect or the gag wears thin instantly. The festival stack suggests the former.
A Cannes Palme d'Or–nominated short of rigorous formal economy: Hodgson constructs his farce around a single spatial and linguistic constraint and never once relaxes its elegant logic.
Dan Hodgson's comic engine — a woman conversing in sign language with her Deaf husband while simultaneously yelling at her hidden lover — turns deafness into structural farce rather than pathos. Cannes Palme d'Or short nomination; the timing has to be exact and apparently is.
Reviews
Smoothly rendered farce that benefits from great timing. A slight tale but very well composed, this is a great calling card.
Love is Blind is sheer comic brilliance. At times over the top but never cartoonish, Hodgson really gets it right.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 2015
- Emden-Norderney Film Festival 2015, Award winner
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2015