From left: Meadow Walker, Jordana Brewster, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Neal H. Moritz attend the the Fast And the Furious screening during the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on Wednesday.Aurore Marechal/Getty Images
The second day of the Cannes Film Festival featured a wealth of high-tier cinema, the kind of prestige-level fare that has cemented the annual French Riviera extravaganza as the ultimate global showcase for the seventh art.
There was Butterfly Jam, a challenging but mostly rewarding family drama starring Barry Keoghan that marked the English-language debut from dissident Russian director Kantemir Balagov. A few hours later, Japanese master Koji Fukada screened his gentle, achingly sincere drama Nagi Notes, which traces the relationship between two women in a rural village. And then rising American provocateur Jane Schoenbrun unveiled the delightfully surreal meta-horror comedy Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, whose geysers of blood and Cronenbergian preoccupation with exploring bodily orifices where no orifices are traditionally found makes it a strictly art-house-only offering.
Yet by far the biggest event of the day, a screening that eclipsed all the many ostensibly prestigious Cannes favourites, arrived in the chiselled form of one very big, very bald, very mumbly mega-star: Vin Diesel.
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The pater familias of the Fast & Furious family stormed the Croisette Wednesday – well, early Thursday morning – for a special late-night “Cannes Classics” screening of the franchise’s very first film, The Fast and the Furious, which is celebrating its perhaps improbable 25th anniversary this year.
Sporting a dark black suit embroidered with the glitter-crusted image of a Dodge Charger (the vehicle of choice for Diesel’s on-screen hero, Dom Toretto) and the words “Fast Forever” (the title of the series’ forthcoming 11th instalment), Diesel basked in the unadulterated glow of the paparazzi while ascending the steps of the Grand Théâtre Lumière.
Diesel wasn’t the only Fast attendee, either. Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez, his co-stars from that first 2001 film, were walking the red carpet to screams and camera clicks, as were longtime series producer Neal H. Moritz, Universal Pictures chief Donna Langley and Meadow Walker, daughter of the late Paul Walker.
The back of Vin Diesel's suit had glitter-crusted image of a Dodge Charger and the words 'Fast Forever,' which is the title of the series’ forthcoming 11th instalment.Scott A Garfitt/The Associated Press
In between signing autographs and mugging for the armada of photographers, Diesel frequently clasped his hands in the prayer formation and stared silently at the heavens above. This is a man who knows just how lucky he is to steal a moment in the Cannes spotlight, not unlike the time that Dom made off with a bank vault full of cash in the franchise’s fifth instalment, Fast Five.
“I’ve never seen a midnight screening like this in my whole life,” Diesel told the sold-out crowd, many still adhering to the black-tie dress code needed for earlier, ostensibly classier screenings. “It’s not like this movie hasn’t been out for a minute.”
Yet Diesel’s Cannes invasion isn’t so ridiculous. And I’m not just saying this because I wrote the literal book on the franchise (a copy of which I elected not to toss onstage during the showing, mostly because I didn’t want to cause an international incident). For starters, this year’s edition of Cannes desperately needed some kind of big juicy Hollywood spectacle, with the lineup conspicuously absent any new releases from the major studios, or even much in the way of high-wattage American indies.
Guests arriving on the red carpet before the screening of the film in Cannes.IAN LANGSDON/AFP/Getty Images
Whereas past editions of Cannes have found room to celebrate the world premieres of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Hollywood executives appear to be rethinking the strategy of debuting their biggest projects in front of a sometimes hostile festival audience. Then there are the mounting costs involved in ferrying all that high-priced talent over to Europe. This year, there are only two U.S. titles in the official competition, both of them – James Gray’s crime thriller Paper Tiger and Ira Sachs’s same-sex romance The Man I Love – not exactly the kind of multiplex-ready fare that sparks the feverish headlines the festival desires.
Enter Fast & Furious, which is in fact no stranger to Cannes. In 2021, when the festival went ahead even as it was hobbled by the pandemic, organizers staged the French premiere of F9: The Fast Saga on the beach along the Croisette to enthusiastic crowds. Diesel also has a long history with the festival himself, having lugged over his short film Multi-Facial to Cannes back in 1995, long before the words “NOS” or “Los Bandoleros” entered the pop-culture lexicon.
More crucially, though, is the fact that the Fast & Furious films are the Platonic ideal of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. The series is one of the most commercially successful of all time, certainly. Its 11 instalments, if we’re counting the 2019 spin-off Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, which we definitely are, have notched more than US$7.3-billion at the box office. But the movies have broken many more cultural barriers, and done so while facing seemingly insurmountable challenges (the death of a star, the ego battles of its lead meatheads, the disruption of the pandemic), that the series deserves as big a spotlight as Cannes is able to offer.
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The films have turned indie actors such as Diesel and Rodriguez into superstars, and coaxed presumably above-all-this Oscar-winners (Charlize Theron, Brie Larson, even Dame Helen Mirren) into embracing their inner action heroes. The movies have pioneered concepts of on-screen diversity, before any talk of “woke” existed. And they’ve radically advanced digital effects technology, a result of producers having to jerry-rig the film’s seventh instalment after Walker died in an off-screen car crash midway through production.
Most of all, though, the films make for exceptionally fun times at the movies.
“I’m not sure we would’ve had The Fast and the Furious in competition, but it is a phenomenon in the contemporary history of the cinema,” Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’ general delegate, told reporters earlier this week. “There are 10 of them! And some are absolutely fantastic!”
From left: Jordana Brewster, Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez on the red carpet.Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
It was a sentiment that the audience inside the Lumière, the festival’s largest auditorium, took to heart. Diesel, Rodriguez and Brewster were greeted like rock stars, while every fan-favourite moment from the first film earned the kind of raucous applause reserved for a Palme d’Or winner.
“I’m only here once in my whole life to come with a film that you, the head of the most prestigious film festival in the world, where every artist in the world wants to be recognized, you’re calling the film we did 25 years ago a classic,” Diesel told Frémaux onstage. “How profound is that?”
By the time the screening ended in the wee hours of the morning, with the crowd giving a teary-eyed Diesel an extended standing ovation, it felt like Cannes could indeed wrap up then and there. Save your Pedro Almodóvar and Cristian Mungiu films for next year. And maybe change the name of that big festival award. The “Palme d’Om” has a nice ring to it.