CANNES, FRANCE — When Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was told that the Festival de Cannes wanted his new film, "Blindness," to open this year's event Wednesday night, he was "surprised, to be honest." Not because of a lack of faith in what he'd done but because of the nature of his accomplishment.
Taken from the novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago and starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover, "Blindness" is in large part a disturbing, unnerving parable about the horrific ways society disintegrates when everyone in it (except Moore's character) goes inexplicably blind. It is not exactly a pretty picture, and, Meirelles says with a smile about opening night, "there's a dinner afterwards, it's not good for the digestion. In France, they like to boo, so I'm a bit worried."
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. 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.
A latecomer to feature films at age 42, after nearly two decades of making independent television and commercials in Brazil, the still-youthful 52-year-old Meirelles says with typically disarming frankness that his choice of subject matter comes from "the advantage of starting doing films when I was very old.
"I had had a career as a commercial director, I had enough money to live on, and I thought it was such a waste of time to work only for money, for box office. If I'd been 29, 30, 35, maybe, but I was too old for that. A lot of money wasn't going to change my life, so what's the point? I was going to deal with subjects I was interested in."
Involving the audience
Yet, and this is one of the things that characterizes Meirelles and helps make "Blindness" a success, "being concerned with and including the audience" is a key part of what motivates him. "Some of my colleagues work for themselves, expressing ideas, but I want to bring the audience to the experience. For me, film finishes in the room it's shown in."
So while "Blindness" remains a harrowing piece to experience, Meirelles, who worked closely with Canadian screenwriter Don McKellar, reports that he softened the film's disturbing (but not graphic) scenes of sexual violence after "the audiences didn't react well at the first test screening; some people even walked out.
