2 stars
When the parents of four children discover that three of them have a degenerative eye disease (retinitis pigmentosa) that will render them blind, they decide to travel the world as a family to give them all enough visual memories to last a lifetime.
It’s an inspirational story that might appear on a magazine cover or in an hour-long TV special. But does it belong in theaters? I have nothing against the family and what they’re going through, but the answer is no. As presented in the documentary Blink by directors Danial Roher and Edmund Srenson, there isn’t enough depth to keep you interested for 84 minutes.
The hook for Edith Lemay, Sébastien Pelletier, and their children is that they plan their itinerary around the kids’ wish list instead of a traditional list of countries to visit. From sleeping on a train to drinking juice on a camel, if Mia, Colin, Laureant, or Léo dream of it, the parents make sure to make it a reality. It’s a beautiful idea, but even with the perfectly timed windfall that Sébastien gets when the company he works for and has stock in gets sold right before they leave, a family of six traveling the world for a year has to cost a lot of money. A lot. The parents claim they kept to a budget of $200 a day – roughly $73,000 – but one can imagine that wouldn’t even cover the flights they take, let alone all the other stuff they do.
And that’s a problem: Not the money, but if you keep thinking about it all the time while watching Blink, the filmmakers aren’t doing their job.
