Cannes 2008:Angelina Jolie stars in Pair

Cannes 2008 is off to a sluggish start, this time with "Blindness" from Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. (His previous features are "City of God" and the English-language screen version of John Le Carre's "The Constant Gardener.") Adapted from the Jose Saramago novel, "Blindness" stars Julianne Moore as the wife of a doctor, played by Mark Ruffalo. In an unspecified city most of the populace has been struck blind by a mysterious plague. Faster than you can say "Camus," the desperate quarantined citizens turn on each other, and their abandoned mental hospital turns into a battleground. Gael Garcia Bernal is the venal ward boss who trades sexual favors for food"Blindness" seemed to me to be a case of a miscast director. The extravagantly skillful Meirelles suffocates the story, which sits ponderously on the screen, with a grunge parade of artfully composed and manipulated images: milky-white "blindness" light, elegant dissolves depicting inelegant decay and misery. He and his cinematographer have a lot of wonderful camera subjects at their disposal, but the actors cannot make this material work on screen.

Coming off "Children of Men," "Blindness" marks the second post-apocalyptic landscape Moore has visited lately. As this allegory grinds on, you may find yourself focusing on matters unrelated to blindness, metaphorical or literal, such as the way Moore sounds exactly like Hillary Clinton on certain line readings.






A far richer experience, Israeli director Ari Folman's animated drama "Waltz with Bashir" made up for the arch inertia of the opening-night selection. It follows an Israeli Army veteran's inquiry regarding his own past, and his repressed memories of the early 1980s Lebanon War.

The collaborators work in a style of animation resembling the rotoscoping efforts of Richard Linklater ("Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly"), though none of the fluid, insinuating frames was actually rotoscoped. They were handmade, and you can tell: The look is deliberately flat in the graphic novel vein, but it doesn't have the robotic slickness that can devolve into pure mannerism. More crucially Folman's story has a lot to say about how a miserable conflict haunts those who wage it. Near the end Folman leaves animation behind for a few startling seconds, and the leap into low-def video news footage of a grieving Palestinian woman is shrewdly judged.




Some things are best shown with the least amount of emotional and visual distance possible.

And check out this trailer for "Three Monkeys," receiving its first Cannes press screening Thursday. (The official premiere comes Friday.) It's the latest film from the Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose previous film, "Climates," was an extraordinary relationship story and a reminder that the cinema still has a few artists devoted to its calling.

I mean, it'll be fun to see "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" this weekend. Not to mention "Kung Fu Panda." But if "Three Monkeys" is half as intriguing as Ceylan's trailer looks....