Blink review – The family’s poignant bucket list trip turns into a glossy travelogue

AAn active, boisterous French-Canadian family of six, led by mother Edith Lemay and father Sébastien Pelletier, discovers that three of their four children have the gene for the disease retinitis pigmentosa. This means that eldest sister Mia and younger boys Colin and Laurent will gradually become blind, first by losing their ability to see in the dark. Only the middle child Léo was lucky and did not inherit it. When the parents asked a doctor what they would do if their child received such a diagnosis, the doctor said they would help their children create as many visual memories as possible while they still had time, so the Lemay-Pelletiers decided to to take a year to do so. go out and travel the world, financed by the shares Sébastian had recently acquired. As well as, presumably, some kind of financial or at least logistical support from the filmmakers who have been quietly documenting all this from the beginning, supported by the National Geographic channel.

The involvement of that station partly explains the wholesome, downright sentimental tone of the film, which constantly emphasizes what a beautiful, kind family these people are, even as they face a literally dark future together. Even the font used for on-screen graphics, which mimics a clunky handheld script, is aggressively corny-cute. The slow trickle of sanctification, enforced with a particularly saccharine score, may be enough to turn some viewers away from the film and even the subjects themselves as they enjoy the dream vacation of a lifetime, flying from country to country and checking off boxes. their bucket list such as “seeing a sunset in the desert” and “drinking juice while riding a camel”.

Of course there are also bad moments. For example, Colin is distraught over being separated from a dog he befriended in the Himalayas, and poor Mia looks increasingly depressed – as if she’s struggling with the prospect of her future or is simply annoyed that she’s missing out on time as a teenager with her friends back. At home. But the filmmakers never explore the psyche very deeply, not even that of the parents. It is one contemporary travelogue cliché after another, albeit beautifully filmed in super high definition.

The best part, perhaps because it deviates so far from the script, is when the entire family and the cameraman get stuck in a cable car in Ecuador at night with no water or toilet, and everyone panics a little. It is also the only time we see any friction between these privileged white northerners and the developing world; the tour guides with whom Sébastian manages to contact by telephone can only say: stay seated and wait, help will come, but not for a while. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.