For the last few years, Screengrab has been lucky enough to have its own man in Cannes. But with Mike D’Angelo’s recent announcement that he wouldn’t be returning to the Croisette this year, we’ve found ourselves without a correspondent to cover the world’s glitziest film festival. So instead, from now through the end of the fest, we’ll be spotlighting reviews of all films in competition- and some out of competition- from writers throughout the blogosphere. It’s no Wack Experiment, but it’ll have to do.
Cannes kicked off today with the Opening Night film, Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness. Here’s a taste of what some folks are saying:
Justin Chang, Variety- “A horror tale, a bleak allegory and a chronicle of human suffering as consoling as it is devastating, "Blindness" emerges onscreen both overdressed and undermotivated, scrupulously hitting the novel's beats yet barely approximating, so to speak, its vision.”
James Rocchi, Cinematical- “While the sweeping allegory of Blindness created a lush, captivating story on the page, film's a slightly less forgiving medium; we find ourselves asking questions not of character and metaphor, but, rather, of plot logic and possibility, and those sharp inquiries poke holes in the film's tension… But [the filmmakers] are not, to their credit, afraid of showing the ugly things that spring from the film's central event; we're shown a world of muck and filth and waste and rotting flesh as the ward slips into chaos in the absence of law and minor medical problems spiral into catastrophes.”
Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere- “The problem with Fernando Meirelles' Blindness, which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival, is that the milieu of the story, which is based on a novel by Jose Saramago, is bleak and confining. It's more than just the milieu, actually. The second and third act of this film delivers a kind of lockdown vibe… This is basically an insane asylum drama -- most of it taking place in a squalid prison in which the victims of said blindness plague have been quarantined -- and as such produced, in me, a deep hunger to escape.”
Stay tuned to Screengrab for more exciting coverage of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The official Cannes Web site can be found here.