Cannes. Blindness.

"Blindness [site] may well be the bleakest curtain raiser in the history of the festival, a nightmarish parable of the apocalypse, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles and just as impressive in its way as his career-making City of God," writes the Guardian's Xan Brooks.

"Blindness feels like a curious mix of highbrow literary aspirations and lowbrow genre fiction," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "[I]t'd be easy to dismiss Blindness as Dawn of the Dead for NPR listeners or Outbreak for grad students.... But while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort; Blindness shows us a world of wide-eyed sightlessness, and it does so through a fierce vision that only occasionally loses focus."

Variety's Justin Chang finds it "an intermittently harrowing but diluted take on José Saramago's shattering novel. Despite a characteristically strong performance by Julianne Moore as a lone figure who retains her eyesight, bearing sad but heroic witness to the horrors around her, Fernando Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago's prose."

"The laudably-ambitious Brazilian director hurls every visual trick in his considerable book at the challenges inherent in making a visual experience out of blindness," writes Fionnuala Halligan for Screen Daily. "Meirelles seems to struggle to find a tone, and Blindness fatally lacks tension before it tips over into bizarre final-act sentimentality."

"It startles but does not surprise," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "The script by Don McKellar bears witness to a mysterious plague of blindness, a 'white' disease in which people's eyes suddenly see only white light. As a cosmopolitan city struggles to cope with the horrifying fallout, a panicked government orders the immediate quarantine of those infected. The herding of shunned people into prison-like camps clearly provokes images of any number of 20th-century atrocities."

"As always, it's impossible to take one's eyes off Moore who is so adept at playing roles in which her strength seems brittle, almost masochistic," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "Alice Braga, a prostitute who is one of the inmates that Moore and [Mark] Ruffalo befriend, is also a stand-out performer. They do well to save a film that, in trying so hard to be faithful to the novel, falls prey to tone-deafness."

"Two or three people clapped at the end of the press screening," reports Jeffrey Wells. "The reception at the press conference was on the muted side. The movie, I fear, is going to be generally 'meh'-ed when it opens, and audiences are almost certainly going to steer clear."

Earlier: Will Lawrence's talk with Meirelles for the Telegraph.

Blindness is in Competition and opens in the US in September.

Updates: "In truth, only a director of Meirelles' particular combination of gifts could have brought that book's combination of despair and hope successfully to the screen," writes Kenneth Turan in a background piece for the Los Angeles Times. "As demonstrated by his best-known features, City of God and The Constant Gardener, which between them earned eight Oscar nominations, Meirelles joins the flair of commercial filmmaking with a socially conscious sensibility." And: "Saramago had wanted to come to the festival for the premiere, but his doctors hadn't allowed him to travel. So the director is flying to Lisbon on Saturday to show him the film. 'That's the screening I'm really afraid of,' he says. 'Two thousand people at the Grand Palais is not a big thing compared to Saramago's opinion.'"

For Charles Ealy at the Austin Movie Blog, it's "broken the traditional opening-day jinx in Cannes. Usually, the first movie of the fest is a real stinker. But Blindness got the show off to a good start Wednesday, with redemption emerging from an apocalypse."

Updates, 5/15: "Blindness is a drum-tight drama, with superb, hallucinatory images of urban collapse," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It has a real coil of horror at its centre, yet lightened with finely judged touches of gentleness and even humour. It reminded me of George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead, John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids and Peter Shaffer's absurdist stage-play Black Comedy, showing humanity groping in the darkness. This is bold and masterly filmmaking from Meirelles: popular entertainment with challenging ideas."

"[I]t's the script that's lacking," writes Dave Calhoun for Time Out. "[A]s a parable for a society - both its working and its failings - Blindness works only in fits and starts and relies too much on events and too little on ideas. Ultimately, it's a film that falls prey to its narrative speed and complexity; as a viewer, one is rarely able to focus on a moment, a scene or a thought and to investigate it for its meaning. There's no room for meditation, which is a bit of a disaster for a film whose story hinges on the need for society to sit back, take a breath and 'see' what it's doing to itself."

"The movie opens with Danny Glover's wise-man voiceover: 'I don't think we went blind; I think we always were.' Get it?" asks Glenn Kenny. "A lot of people have more of a stomach for this sort of thing than I do, but I couldn't help wondering just what there was here to admire as the metaphor gave way to an allegory." Still, "The conclusion moved me rather unexpectedly - Meirelles intimations of grace always come in unexpected ways, which make them work."

"The 2008 Cannes kickoff was a dog," declares Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's not a bad film in any risible or outrageous way; Meirelles is a careful craftsman who can create memorable images, and Julianne Moore gives a performance of great tenderness, strength and vulnerability in the leading role. But Saramago's allegorical novel about a mysterious epidemic of blindness that paralyzes a major city - and perhaps all of human society - just wasn't meant for the movies."

"Pretentious trans-national, empty dud," pronounces Facets' Milos Stehlik.

"That the director succeeds more often than he fails proves the resilience of Saramago's potent themes as well as Meirelles's skillful visual language," writes Stephen Garrett for Esquire. "But Blindness stumbles because it's a fundamental mismatch: A visceral director better known for searing portraits of real-life injustices shouldn't really make a parable."

Erica Abeel talks with Meirelles for the IFC.

Updates, 5/16: "Curiously, the film's carefully calibrated racial and ethnic demographics echo those of the central castaways in Lost, though any given episode in that show's best seasons is far better," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Smarter too."

"[I]t's a dopey B-movie injected with simplistic melodrama - but maybe that's just a sign of the times," writes Eric Kohn in Stream.

"Because Blindness is an apocalypse-now movie for people who don't like horror or sci-fi or war films (or whatever generic bastard Children of Men was, either), it's therefore a melodrama - which in turn means that the Moore character's doctor hubby (Mark Ruffalo) spends the last few scenes whispering sweet nadas a la 'I miss you - I miss you so much,'" blogs Rob Nelson for the Boston Phoenix. "Yeah yeah, Mumbleman, love is blind, but here you wish it could be dumb - not stupid, but dumb."

"Evident from his first two features, Meirelles is almost too good at aestheticizing depravity," writes Patrick Z McGavin for Stop Smiling. "To its credit, the movie is fairly uncompromising.... A lot of the movie was shot in Toronto, and the use of the depopulated landscape and almost sinister architecture recalls David Cronenberg's Crash. Blindness never quite reaches that level of inspiration or audacity. It desperately needed that kind of personality, a Cronenberg, somebody to demonstrate how the transgressive and breakdown of the body is just the means for finding and revealing art."

Update, 5/17: "It's perhaps not a shock that Moore can pull off the role of a suffering housewife, but there's more to it than that; as she attempts to lead her followers through the tragedy, her face and body gradually register increasing measures of horror, exhaustion, and strength," writes Matt Noller at the House Next Door. "It's deep, layered acting, powerful but never showy; Meirelles could learn a thing or two from her."

Updates, 5/18: "The film works like an upmarket zombie thriller, with echoes of 28 Days Later and I Am Legend," writes the Observer's Jason Solomons. "But its parable elements, about the breakdown of society and the warring human urges for power, survival and kindness, are more haunting than in traditional horror movies. Meirelles infuses the carnage with humanism, teetering on the sentimental and pompous but never toppling in."

"The flamboyance of Meirelles's direction sits strangely at odds with the severe subject, and one problem is that Saramago's novel is one of those compelling, near-perfect works that never really needed to be filmed in the first place," writes Jonathan Romney in the Independent. "Given such a realist treatment, a resonant parable becomes a conventional apocalyptic adventure. But there's much to defend here - above all, Moore's commanding performance, catching a delicate balance between vulnerability and authority."

Update, 5/20: Kim Voynar posts extensive notes from the roundtable interviews.

---

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

---

Posted by dwhudson at May 14, 2008 10:39 AM