Cannes Blog: Seeing "Blindness" ain't kinky

[Ed Note: ThePhoenix.com freelancer Rob Nelson is embedded at Cannes and will be filing reports all this week, provided he can stay out of jail, resist the urge to screw off into the south of France, and survive the Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull press conference. Stay tuned for daily updates from the front lines of cinematic ridiculosity.]

CANNES, FRANCE -- FYI: Casual sex ? or recreational sex, sport F-ing, whatever you wanna call it ? isn’t the only thing for which Cannes is renowned and adored. Seems they show motion pictures in this debauched seaside paradise as well!

As per a recent Cannes press release: “Select media” (who, moi?) “[are] invited to join Cannes beauties and legendary French producer Alain Siritzky for announcement of new 50 million dollar feature film and kick off of worldwide search for the new Emmanuelle... Media who [sic] does [sic] not respond will be admitted depending on space and time limitations.”

Monsieur! Lemme in!

The sense that nothing could be worse for impatiently queuing cineastes than not seeing (whereas for nymphos here it’s kinky) has been made meta ? sorta ? by Blindness, a Julianne Moore-headlined pseudo-thriller wherein the titular malady spreads quicker than crabs on the Croisette. Emmanuelle aside, if there’s anyone here who saw Blindness and thinks it’s watchable, I don’t know her--not carnally or any other way.

Directed by City of God auteur Fernando Meirelles, Blindness (which you can choose not to see come fall) seems to have been booked for l’ouverture because it’s a Big Metaphor Movie about all that’s hidden in plain sight these days ? good movies included. In the dull, dour film’s one funny moment, Gael García Bernal’s blind-leading blind thug croons a Stevie Wonder song (get it?) over an Abu Ghraibesque compound’s intercom. Soon thereafter, women, as in the novel on which the Blindness flick is based, are forced to become whores for food. (Metaphor? Don’t ask me...)
 
Because Blindness is an apocalypse-now movie for people who don’t like horror or sci-fi or war films (or whatever generic bastard Children of Men was, either), it’s therefore a melodrama ? which in turn means that the Moore character’s doctor hubby (Mark Ruffalo) spends the last few scenes whispering sweet nadas a la “I miss you ? I miss you so much.” Yeah yeah, Mumbleman, love is blind, but here you wish it could be dumb ? not stupid, but dumb.

Silencio.

? Rob Nelson