2008 Festival de Cannes: Part Three

Day 1

Madness at the first press screening--Fernando Mireilles’ Blindness. It’s based on the novel by Portuguese Nobel prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago, and was shot by Mireilles (City of God, Constant Gardener) in Canada. Julianne Moore is left with sight as she accompanies her blind husband to a former mental institution where victims of a “white blindness” epidemic are herded and sent by the government. Mireilles might have a talent for visual flair, but it’s not enough to pull off this top-heavy philosophical allegory of society’s descent into cruelty and evil. Exactly two people applauded at the end of the press screening in a theatre seating 1,500. The film is short on character motivation, tries to remain faithful to the spirit of the novel with narration that veers to philosophical statements that come off as ponderous and pompous. Gabriel Garcia Bernal plays the bad guy, but a bad guy without motivation is little more than caricature. Pretentious trans-national, empty dud.

Moore, looking very striking here at the press conference with Bernal.

But a very, very exciting film here last night, Waltz with Bashir--directed by Ari Folman. Feature length animation, the film features the filmmaker as a central character, trying to deal with his recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Gradually, by visiting a psychiatrist friend and other former army buddies, he peels back the layers of repressed memory which deal with his army service in Lebanon twenty years ago, and leads, ultimately, to the massacre of civilians at the Shattila camp. A film which resonates to the true, real experience of every soldier and to the current experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, Waltz with Bashir is brilliant (and fast-paced) because the abstraction of the theme thro ugh animation allows Folman to compress events. The film feels very personal and almost intimate--the first real winner here, in Cannes.

- Facets Multi-Media Executive Director Milos Stehlik, reporting from the 2008 Festival de Cannes.