"Julianne Moore & Gael Garcia Bernal @ Blindness Photocall in Cannes 2008"

Fernando Meirelles' Blindness is bleak but impressive, reports Xan Brooks on the first day of Cannes 2008. The other films, though, are still shrouded in Mediterranean mist View to a chill... Blindness, 'a cold-eyed portrait of social meltdown' It's the opening morning of the 61st Cannes film festival and the international press are cordoned in their metal pens outside the Palais. The sun is blazing, the traffic thrumming at our backs, and up on the steps the be-suited security guards are eyeing us with a studied indifference. We have become so institutionalised that it almost feels like home.
This year's opening gala is not about to make us feel any better about our place in the world. Blindness may well be the bleakest curtain raiser in the history of the festival, a nightmarish parable of the apocalypse, directed by the Brazilian film-maker Fernando Meirelles and just as impressive in its way as his career-making City of God. In the wake of an unexplained epidemic, the blind inhabitants of an unnamed city find themselves herded out to a derelict hospital by the railroad. Julianne Moore plays the one sighted person in the compound, with Mark Ruffalo as her stumbling, vulnerable husband. For good measure, the film also finds room for a puckish supporting role for Gael García Bernal as the gun-toting, food-hoarding demagogue of ward three.














source:FIRST LOOK: Cannes colors 'Blindness' http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-blindness9-2008may09,0,970640.story?track=rss and http://film.guardian.co.uk/cannes2008/story/0,,2279850,00.html Julianne Moore and the cast in dress by Christian Lacroix