TORONTO - If the film adaptation of Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's acclaimed novel "Blindness" finds a more receptive audience on this side of the Atlantic, it will seem the critics at Cannes were right about one thing -- the narration had to go.
The film, an often brutal study of the fragility of humanity after residents of an unnamed city are struck blind, was retooled before being screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Atlantic Film Festival.
Everyone involved, it seems, recognized what didn't work with the cut that was shown to mixed reviews in France in May.
"Actually, we rushed to go to Cannes. We were hoping to go to Cannes, but at the end of the festival. Then they gave us opening night, that was 10 days before, which is crazy," said director Fernando Meirelles.
"So the first time I saw the film was in the screening, if you believe that, with the audience (at Cannes)."
"Blindness" was the opening night gala, and although audience reception was warm the reviews that followed couldn't decide whether it was a triumph, a flop or something in between.
However, many reviewers seemed to agree that the narration, provided by actor Danny Glover who also stars in the film, was too much.
"Glover's voice-over keeps spelling out questions that the audience is already asking itself," London's Daily Telegraph wrote. Another review said the film was "burdened with a narrator whose voice-over... pushes us away from contemplating the themes and scenes of the film."
Meirelles, the affable Brazilian director of such critically acclaimed films as "City of God" and "The Constant Gardener," laid the blame squarely on himself during a round of interviews in Toronto.
"The film works perfectly without it, but (Canadian actor and screenwriter Don McKellar) wrote beautiful voice-over because I insisted," Meirelles said.
"He didn't want to. And Danny Glover did it in a very nice way. I really like voice-over but ... that was that."
The actors -- including the one whose voice was cut -- couldn't agree more.
"Initially, the narration covered just about the entire (film). I thought it was too much," said Glover, who still has plenty of dialogue as one of the quarantined victims of the blindness epidemic.
"It basically editorialized what happened. ... With actors, less is more."
Mark Ruffalo portrays a doctor who is among the first to be rounded up along with his still-sighted wife (Julianne Moore) and quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum (filmed in a Guelph, Ont., prison). He said the narration left the audience "disengaged."
"If the audience doesn't have to work at it anymore, (if) they're being told the story as they're watching it, I think it just made people zone out," Ruffalo said.
One scene that remains intact from the original version is perhaps the most harrowing of the film: a group of women are gang-raped by men who have declared themselves the dictators of the asylum.
"The rape scene was a big deal in Cannes," said Ruffalo. "I know (the festival) almost didn't accept the film."
Despite the horror that unfolds as society breaks down in the face of its citizens going blind, McKellar said the film also speaks to nobler qualities of human nature.
"To me it is the capacity of human dignity to endure the worst possible circumstances," said McKellar.
The characters "discover the extent of their power and their responsibility to act too. So they find themselves and they are transformed in a way."
"Blindness" opens in theatres Oct. 3.
