The Empire Strikes Out

Adam Dawtrey on the new breed of foreign film-makers who are beating Hollywood at its own game

The opening gala of the Cannes Film Festival is seldom a glorious night for cinema. The elite of the French film industry squeeze into their ill-fitting evening suits or frou-frou frocks and climb the red carpet with the fatalistic gaiety of aristos mounting the guillotine steps. There’s no avoiding what lies ahead; their only hope is that it will be swift. But it rarely is. Anyone remember My Blueberry Nights, Fanfan la tulipe, Hollywood Ending or Vatel? Thought not. The people who sat through these turgid films—and aside from the first-night crowd at Cannes, that’s virtually no one—wish they could forget.

This year, however, was different. The Cannes selectors showed mercy by raising the curtain with perhaps the most eagerly anticipated movie of the entire competition. Not the senile doodling of a has-been, or a Euro soufflé that stubbornly failed to rise, but a film by a populist auteur working at the height of his powers. A film-maker, moreover, who is the avatar of a new kind of cinema. Blindness is the latest work by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. He and his breed are waging a guerilla war of independence from the Hollywood empire that is starting to win hearts and minds at multiplexes from Tokyo to Timbuktu.

Meirelles first sprang to attention at Cannes in 2002 with City of God, his kinetic account of gang warfare in the favelas of Rio. But it was his 2005 version of John Le Carré’s conspiracy thriller The Constant Gardener (which won an Oscar for Rachel Weisz) that revealed him as a film-maker not content to be confined to the festival circuit, the usual ghetto for foreign auteurs.

Meirelles is one of a group of directors who are challenging the myth, long subliminally peddled by Hollywood, that only American stories can be truly universal and that all other movies are merely picturesque. They include Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu from Mexico, Pedro Almodóvar from Spain, Peter Jackson from New Zealand, Timur Bekmambetov from Russia, and Ang Lee from Taiwan, along with early forerunners such as Roman Polanski from Poland and Paul Verhoeven from Holland, who went to Hollywood and then fled.

Traditionally, if such men wanted to tell stories to a global audience, their only option was to move to Hollywood and submit to the tyranny of American tastes. But the tectonic plates of the movie business are shifting. The major American film studios have become more dependent on overseas revenues, even as America’s authority abroad has ebbed dramatically under George W. Bush. Star power, long Hollywood’s weapon of mass destruction, is losing its force. Will Smith could open a video of your granny’s 90th birthday party to a $100 million weekend, but nobody else has that kind of megatonnage.

Local movies may not be eating the studios’ lunch, but they are certainly taking a bite out of their cake. In response, with their feral instinct for self-preservation, the Hollywood majors are rushing into the production of foreign films. Which means a director like Meirelles can stay home, and stay as independent as he likes. “The world doesn’t depend economically on the US like it did ten years ago, and I think the same thing is happening in cinema,” says Meirelles. “We can finance our own movies, and that means it can be an exchange of culture with America, not just a one-way relationship, which is good for us and I think it is good for them.”

The finance for Blindness was raised by selling it before it was made to independent distributors in every country except America. Meirelles only offered the film to the US after it was finished. Cuarón, del Toro and Iñárritu have raised their own money for a company named Cha Cha Cha to make Mexican movies, which Universal will distribute worldwide. Del Toro himself, having just made Hellboy 2 for Universal, is heading off to New Zealand to work with Jackson on two Hobbit movies for MGM and 20th Century Fox.

Jackson blazed the trail with The Lord of the Rings. New Line took a remarkable decision to give $270 million to a little-known Kiwi to recreate Tolkien’s Middle Earth from his own landscape, on his own terms. Meirelles has done something similar in Blindness, though for a tenth of the cost. Based on a novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago, it’s a dark satire about the collapse of civilisation when people mysteriously start losing their sight. Saramago never identifies the city or country where the epidemic strikes, and nor does Meirelles. It is everywhere and nowhere. Even the characters don’t have names.

It’s easy to imagine a Hollywood version of this story, set somewhere generic like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. Meirelles shot in his home city of São Paolo, a vast, sprawling, modern metropolis unlike any cliché of Latin America, and unrecognisable to anyone who has never been there. “São Paolo is the third- or fourth-biggest city in the world, but nobody knows it,” explains Meirelles. “It’s a huge city, but you have no clue where you are. If you don’t establish where the story is set, it becomes very universal.”

The fine ensemble cast—Julianne Moore, Danny Glover, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal, Alice Braga—was deliberately chosen for its mix of nationalities, ethnicities and accents, to make the scene of the action impossible to locate. These actors bring cachet, but the director is the real star who will get the crowd excited at Cannes and beyond.

In the coming post-Hollywood world, names such as Meirelles, Jackson, Cuarón and the rest are luxury brands for the discerning mass-market consumer, the cinematic equivalent of a Prada or an Armani, offering a decidedly un-American sensibility at a time when the American empire may be finally losing its grip on global tastes. —AD

MOVIES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD (SORT OF)

Conan the Barbarian

Yes, the movie that set Arnie on his way in his 20-year campaign to become governor of California. The body-building documentary Pumping Iron had already made him a minor celebrity, and he actually won a Golden Globe for his acting in Stay Hungry, but, however ridiculous it seems now, it was Conan that made him a star and made everything else possible. Unless America changes its laws to allow a foreign native to become president, the Austrian-born governator has climbed as high as he can go—though with Arnie anything seems possible.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

The movie that gave us Elizabeth Hurley. OK, she wasn’t exactly in it. But nor was she exactly in the dress that she wore to the premiere as Hugh Grant’s girlfriend, still the finest role she has ever played in an acting career most kindly described as fitful. And so a global phenomenon was born, an entire culture of celebrity for its own sake, although Hurley’s successors never matched her class or her longevity. The lovely Elizabeth is not an actress. She’s not really a model in the Naomi Campbell sense of the word either, though she certainly makes an excellent living from having her picture taken. Her career has been a staggeringly impressive exercise in making her 15 minutes of fame last 14 years (and counting).

Ordinary People

Everyone knows that Taxi Driver inspired John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. But Robert Redford’s Ordinary People had the opposite effect on Mark David Chapman—almost. In October 1980 this unhinged Holden Caulfield wannabe came to New York with the vague intention of punishing John Lennon for being a “phoney”. He whiled away the time by visiting a cinema where Redford’s film was playing. Something about its account of a family battling with bereavement flipped a switch in Chapman’s brain, and he went home to Hawaii. Unfortunately, the benign effects wore off and he returned to New York two months later. Which perhaps only proves that films don’t change history as much as we might wish them to. —AD

BRITISH FILM NOIR

Until recently, British cinema came in any colour, so long as it wasn’t black. This summer, three very different films by three very different filmmakers from west London—two black men and one Indian woman—will change that. Noel Clarke’s Adulthood, Steve McQueen’s Hunger and Gurinder Chadha’s Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging have one thing in common: none of them says anything about “the black British experience”.

Adulthood, a sequel to the 2006 pic Kidulthood, is about the harsh growing pains of inner-city kids who had too much (sex, drugs, violence), too young. Chadha’s comedy is based on Louise Rennison’s bestseller about the trials and tribulations of being a 14-year-old girl. And McQueen, whose video art beat Tracey Emin’s unmade bed to the Turner Prize back in 1999, has made a movie about the last six weeks of IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands. Perhaps black British cinema has finally come of age just as the label has become irrelevant. —AD

Adam Dawtrey is Variety’s European editor

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