Grim Brazilian drama opens Cannes film festival

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Wed, May 14 07:18 PM

By Mike Collett-White

CANNES, France (Reuters) - Brazilian movie "Blindness" brought apocalyptic visions of society in meltdown to Cannes on Wednesday, and the director conceded his grim take on humanity was an odd choice to open the glitzy film festival.

It was a downbeat start to 12 days of movies, interviews, publicity stunts and late-night revelry in the Riviera resort, which prides itself on championing tough cinema as much as rolling out the red carpet for Hollywood royalty.

Directed by Brazil's Fernando Meirelles, of "City of God" renown, English-language "Blindness" is an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago's novel of the same name, and tells the story of a plague of blindness sweeping the world.

Julianne Moore plays a doctor's wife, who, like the film's audience, is able to see the death, cruelty, degradation as well as the dignity around her, and who gradually becomes aware of the responsibility her unique position brings.

"We consider ourselves so strong and sophisticated and solid, and then one thing goes and everything collapses," Meirelles told reporters after a press screening.

"We are skating on thin ice. Anything can happen and everything does."

The movie officially premieres in the evening.

He and scriptwriter Don McKellar were inspired by how the novel appeared to reflect real-life natural disasters, disease and our growing concerns over food security.

"Movies don't predict, they reflect culture," said Moore. "I think we're reflecting what we're feeling in our own culture."

"ODD" CHOICE FOR OPENING

Meirelles said it was both a pressure and an honour to open Cannes, but added: "To be honest, I still don't think this is the best film to open a festival."

Moore called the choice "kind of odd". Asked why she had agreed to act in "Blindness" soon after starring in the equally bleak "Children of Men", she replied: "I like the apocalypse."

Much of the film is set in an abandoned asylum outside an unnamed city, where those stricken by the contagious "White Sickness" -- so called because the blind see white, not black -- are locked up by increasingly panicked authorities.

A workable system of living despite the squalor soon breaks down when one prisoner, played by Mexico's Gael Garcia Bernal, takes the law into his own hands.

Atrocities are committed amid the anarchy, and when the prisoners break free, Moore finds the whole city has fared little better.

"We play civilised ... people because we have food, we have everything very well established," Meirelles said. "We lose this (and) it reveals what we really are underneath."

Joining Meirelles in the main competition is another Brazilian entry "Line of Passage", by Walter Salles, and two Argentine productions -- Pablo Trapero's prison drama "Leonera" and thriller "The Headless Woman" by Lucrecia Martel.

They are up against Clint Eastwood's "Changeling", starring Angelina Jolie, and Steven Soderbergh's "Che", a two-part, four-and-a-half hour epic on Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, with Benicio del Toro in the title role.

The other two U.S. entries are James Gray's "Two Lovers", featuring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, and Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The biggest show in town this year is likely to be the latest instalment of the Indiana Jones series, again starring Harrison Ford as the whip-wielding archaeologist in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" by Steven Spielberg.

(To read more about our entertainment news, visit our blog "Fan Fare" online at http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare )

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