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Cannes Dispatch: Part One
An online exclusive
Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo in Blindness
Thursday, May 15, 2008
By Patrick Z. McGavin
CANNES, France—The 61st Cannes film festival formally opened Wednesday afternoon with a screening of Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness, an adaptation of the highly praised novel by Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago.
Cannes is a strange mixture of dovetailing and shifting identities. The festival’s dominant focus is the “official selection,” comprising the competition, the secondary program Un Certain Regard and the “hors competition,” the special screening or out of competition slots.
It also has several satellite programs, most famously the Directors’ Fortnight, an alternative festival that developed out of the revolutionary shutdown of the festival in May 1968. At its best, the festival’s two-week duration and emphasis on serious art cinema transforms the profile of talented and interesting directors to an unexpected level of exposure and attention.
Cannes grafts many parts and forms of the French cultural identity — a bruising, sometimes blunt collage of the institutional, political, artistic, and nationalist. But the festival is quite possibly the only time of the year when director-driven movies are granted equal footing with the technological and cultural apparatus that is Hollywood.
From the point of view of their editors and publishers, the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s new installment of the Indiana Jones cycle on Sunday afternoon is, for many American journalists, their justification for being here. Alternately the great thrill and conflict of the festival is going against that grain, insisting on a different or more personal brand of artistic expression, and then sticking up to your own instincts.
If this is a “typical Cannes,” the next two weeks is bound to be enthralling, fascinating, maddening and beautiful.
Festivals follow a certain trajectory of revelations, surprises and disappointments. Last year, Wong Kar-wai’s English-language debut, My Blueberry Nights, opened the festival. The film was largely deemed a disappointment, proving that Cannes is intensely impressionistic and immersive — it demands you surrender to the completeness of the experience. Just hours later, those feelings were permanently extinguished by the first view of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Mungiu’s film won the Palme d’Or, capping a strong and distinguished lineup that was probably the most artistically accomplished of any of the 13 festivals I’ve attended.
Fernando Meirelles made his international reputation five years ago with the out of competition debut of his feature debut, City of God. His follow-up, an adaptation of John le Carre’s The Constant Gardener, positioned him as a filmmaker ready to bring his distinctive and visually acute sensibility to less genre-dependent material. Blindness is a significant work of literature. Like much of Saramago’s books (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, for one), the film feels largely resistant to translation. The screenplay is by Canadian director and actor Don McKella. His work is largely faithful, despite one rather unfortunate alteration. Saramago’s novel brilliantly intertwines Orwell and Huxley in yielding a science fiction inflected parable about a collective nightmare — the breakdown and social depravity that follows an incurable outbreak of “white blindness” after a group of disparate people is suddenly subjected to a terrifying and uncomprehending loss of sight.
“[B]lindness did not mean being plunged into banal darkness, but living inside a luminous halo,” Saramago wrote. The film is best at evoking the dread, confusion and panic that impact the damned and confused. Working with a talented cinematographer, his frequent collaborator Cesar Charlone, Meirelles repeatedly draws on that halo image. The film's early transitions — the fade out to white — convey a sharp and trenchant sense of loss. They also connote a form of erasure that wipes out consciousness. In the novel and film, the characters are stripped of distinguishing features. Shorn of names, they are identified as “figures": the doctor, the doctor’s wife, the girl with the dark sunglasses.
The afflicted are rounded up and sequestered in a mental asylum converted into an terrifying form of confinement. Julianne Moore is the doctor’s wife who feigns her condition to guarantee her isolation with her husband (Mark Ruffalo), an ophthalmologist. The particulars of the novel instantly evoke the moral revulsion of Auschwitz or Stalin’s gulags. Evident from his first two features, Meirelles is almost too good at aestheticizing depravity. To its credit, the movie is fairly uncompromising.
In the novel, Saramago eschews most standard forms of punctuation. The dialogue is rendered in a staccato, almost hallucinatory stream of consciousness that consistently splinters and breaks off. It’s vertiginous on the page. Movies are naturally more kinetic and plastic. The adaptation reproduces the key sequences from the novel, but the characters are distant and undifferentiated.
The movie’s most significant departure, the imposition of a narrator, makes explicit and out front what the movie is supposed to do through the layering of images and sounds. It’s the one part of the film that feels engineered and over determined to contrast the near constant forms of misery and personal violation. By drawing on the voice over at the start, the movie opens fatally off key.
Moore is a terrific actor, and she imbues the work with a lean and purposeful intensity. Blindness is composed very sensually, and is unusually attuned to bodies and faces. The other standout in the ensemble cast is the Brazilian actress Alice Braga. Her presence is more fractured, but her moments carry an erotic charge and sexual volatility that make her intensely compelling.
The filmmakers also make a critical error by designing one key couple as Japanese, a strange choice given the source material works so effectively because of the very absence of specificity. It renders a world that that feels eerily abstract. 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.