“Black Sun” is a meditative, dreamy, and lovely — perhaps too lovely — documentary about Hugues de Montalembert, a French painter and filmmaker who was blinded by two burglars in his Greenwich Village apartment in 1978. According to his account in the film, which will air on HBO Wednesday, the artist fought off one of the robbers — described only as “the big one” — with a fireplace poker, but in doing so, forgot about the other — described only as “the little one.”

Sadly, the little one was armed with paint thinner, which he hurled into the painter’s eyes. Paint thinner cannot be washed out with water. Its job, as Mr. Montalembert explains, is to dig into material, to strip away, and that is exactly what it did to him. Within minutes he could barely see; within hours he was functionally blind, and he remains so to this day. At age 35, he was undone by a chemical he would have been only too familiar with professionally, and his career was over.

As if to emphasize that he cannot to see us, “Black Sun,” which was directed by Gary Tarn, an English filmmaker and musician (his soundtrack is heard throughout), never shows us Mr. Montalembert. Nor do we ever see his paintings or films. Instead, we hear him tell the story of the robbery, his unusually accepting attitude toward what would be a disaster for anyone but especially for a visual artist, and the unusual resolution, spirit, and speed with which he underwent rehabilitation and quickly regained his former independence. — even if, as he says, learning to accept the help of strangers is a prerequisite for successfully adapting to sightlessness.

Once a man who lived primarily through his eyes — he recounts overhearing an old friend say that, when he still could see, he scrutinized the world so fiercely he had eyes like “an assassin” — Mr. Montalembert discovered that despite being sightless, his brain continued to produce vivid imagery, both realistic and surreal, and often intensely erotic in nature. Vision is creation, not perception, he claims, and many of the “sighted” don’t really see at all — they merely use their eyes in order to avoid bumping into things.

The film is simplicity itself. It consists of nothing more than the artist’s refined, soothing voice, and Mr. Tarn’s music and images, which include abstract shapes and colors, dreamlike, blurred images, as well as footage of New York, New Delhi, and the Himalayas, among other exotic locales. A meditation on loss and the acceptance of fate, “Black Sun” is moving, even inspirational, but ultimately a little too easy.

Nothing is said about the artist’s assailants, though they must have been the last two people this proudly visual man ever saw clearly. Even if it’s not the point of the film, one wouldn’t mind knowing if his assailants were ever caught. The film also blithely ignores the sudden end to Mr. Montalembert’s career as a painter. Did he not regret it? And how, for instance, did he survive financially?

A clue can be found in old newspaper accounts (not mentioned in the film) of the incident. A New York Times report of the robbery, dated May 26, 1978, refers to Mr. Montalembert as “a French Count,” which suggests he had money. Another Times article filed from Florence eight years earlier again refers to him as a Count and provides an extensive description of his high-society wedding in a Florentine palazzo to Idanna Pucci di Barsenio. (“The Puccis are to Florence what the Van Rensselaers are to New York or the Winthrops to Boston.”) The two had met at “a psychedelic party in New York,” and were eager to get back there as soon as possible. “Manhattan is the only place for young people to be now,” the youthful Mr. — or rather, Count — Montalembert said at the time.

There is much to admire both about this film and Mr. Montalembert himself. After a lengthy period of rehabilitation at the Lighthouse in New York, he tried, as much as possible, to live a normal life. Shortly after the attack, a doctor asked him if he had ever socialized with the blind, and he realized that in fact he didn’t know anyone who was blind. He began to have visions of society gently lowering blind people into pits in the desert, and decided he would not join them there. He learned that, when people (particularly strangers) know you can’t see them, they reveal things they would never tell anyone else. He reveled in music as never before, learned to play piano, discovered that many people are extraordinarily charitable, and found that if you can persuade yourself to trust the world, to learn “to dance with it,” as he puts it, things will probably go well for you.

This led him to decide to travel — alone — to all manner of far-off places. He even went to the Himalayas in pursuit of a girl he was in love with, though we aren’t told whether he found her. In Bali, he wrote a book (“Eclipse”) about his experiences. It was a bestseller in France and perhaps explains why he has been able to live and travel freely.

At the end, Mr. Montalembert does concede that, if a cure were available, he’d ask for his sight back in a minute, and that the inevitable hardships of old age will undoubtedly be considerably more severe in his case. In a particularly touching scene, he recounts a conversation with a Cambodian cab driver in Paris, where he now lives. Noticing that Mr. Montalembert was blind, the driver tried to console him. The artist replied that, in certain ways, the blind are fortunate because their disability is immediately evident and therefore provokes frequent and unexpected acts of charity. Others, whose wounds are hidden to the eye, are not so fortunate. The cab driver agreed with this. “My wife and four children were killed in front of me in Cambodia,” he said.

bbernhard@nysun.com