From courtside to Croisette, Spike Lee brings basketball trash talk to a contentious Cannes
CANNES, France — At the premiere of Spike Lee's new movie, 'Highest 2 Lowest,' a woman squeezed into my row, sighing that she'd been held up by a Samoyed traipsing the red carpet in a ruffled gown. 'Blocked by a dog in a dress!' she said with a huff. The dog, Felicity, attended as the plus-one of an animal rights activist representing a U.K. group called NoToDogMeat. Still, even Felicity was out-glammed by that night's center of attention, Lee, who held court in Knicks-themed couture, a blue-and-orange-striped zoot suit with matching fedora and spectacles.
'Highest 2 Lowest,' a reworking of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 crime drama 'High and Low,' stars Denzel Washington as a wealthy record-label executive who gets squeezed for a $17.5 million ransom by kidnappers who claim they've taken his son. As Washington made his way into the Grand Théâtre Lumière, he looked pleasantly confused when a photographer caught his attention by waving a shiny quartz stone at him. A few minutes later, the actor was doubly delighted and startled when Cannes director Thierry Frémaux announced he was received an even shinier object: a surprise honorary Palme d'Or, along with a career-spanning montage that rewound all the way back to Washington's first film role in 1981's 'Carbon Copy.'
'It's a very special day,' Frémaux said onstage, gesturing to Lee in his orchestra seat. 'Because it's what, the 30th anniversary of 'Do the Right Thing?' Or the 40th?'
Lee cupped his hands around his mouth. '36!' he yelled.
Yes, let's be precise. 'Do the Right Thing' debuted in that very theater 36 years ago to the day — possibly even to the hour. At that Cannes in 1989, Lee figured he had a good shot at winning the Palme d'Or. He lost to Steven Soderbergh's 'sex, lies, and videotape.' Legend has it that jury president Wim Wenders refused to award 'Do the Right Thing' anything, arguing that Lee's act of destruction at the movie's incendiary climax wasn't heroic. Lee countered that he had a Louisville Slugger with Wenders name on it.
Timing is everything. Not just for 'Do the Right Thing,' which today is an inarguable masterpiece, or for Lee, who reminded the crowd that it was also Malcolm X's 100th birthday. Timing matters to every audacious artist. Bold works can hit with such a wallop that it takes a beat to gauge their lasting impact, to tell which set of brass knuckles left a mark: love or hate?
Cannes takes risk on divisive movies, on big swings. Last year's festival launched the best picture Oscar contenders 'Anora,' 'Emilia Perez' and 'The Substance.' I only liked one of them, but each gave us plenty to argue about. This year, I was enchanted to meet a critic who said she'd loathed three movies so far, and every title she named was one of my favorites. I asked her to let me know if she came across anything else she hates. I'd like to see it.
Besides Ari Aster's 'Eddington' (I dug, she despised), the most polarizing film of Cannes 2025 is turning out to be Lynne Ramsay's 'Die, My Love,' which stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as new parents who are disastrously not up to the challenge. Lawrence has the showier meltdown. A former New Yorker uprooted to the countryside, Grace suffers from a postpartum depression that makes her feel like like a dreary wraith. She acts out to prove she's alive, which here mostly translates as her expressing a need to get shagged.
Mubi, a distributor that tends to have impeccable taste, purchased 'Die My Love' for an eyebrow-cocking $24 million. I couldn't stand the movie, but buying it makes some sense as Lawrence hurls herself into the kind of battering performance that gets awards attention, especially after what Mubi learned last year as it maneuvered 'The Substance's' Demi Moore all the way to the Academy Awards.
Of the two leads, I'd slightly favor giving a prize to Pattinson, who has the subtler and more pathetic role of the mealy, over-matched husband, Jackson, so clueless he tries to cheer up Grace and their crying baby by bringing home an even whinier dog. With apologies to Felicity, the film's mutt is so obnoxious that you can't wait for the inevitable moment when it disappears from the story.
The better sadomasochistic romance is in 'Pillion,' an attention-grabby tryst between a dorky male meter maid (Harry Melling) and a domineering biker (Alexander Skarsgård) who runs with a gang where every macho man has a hogtied boyfriend at his command. 'I hope that it makes some of you a little bit horny,' said its director Harry Lighton as he introduced the film. It definitely left the audience tickled, especially at the gleam in Melling's eyes as he licks Skarsgård's leather boots.
'Pillion' isn't judgmental, but it also doesn't expect Melling's naif to like everything his partner orders him to do. It's about finding one's own boundaries. And it's funny, too, especially with Melling's adorably British parents (Lesley Sharp and Douglas Hodge) conceding that their son's special someone is handsome, although they must insist that both lads wear helmets when they go speeding off.
Most of the major titles have now premiered. While I'm not homesick, I did think the only good part of Hubert Charuel's 'Meteors,' an addiction-themed buddy dramedy, was when a character wore a vintage Lakers jersey. In the 11 days I've been here, a few themes have emerged. Whatever you do, don't swig rosé every time a dog dies (thrice) or whenever someone shoots up heroin or mentions God (exponentially more). You'll be hungover by noon.
Kristen Stewart's directorial debut 'The Chronology of Water' follows a boozy, damaged poet who could keep pace with that drinking game. Imogen Poots is quite good as Lidia, a self-destructive life-guzzler who, over the course of the film, goes from 17-years-old to middle-aged, a time span she mostly spends wasted. Stewart has made an assured mess: a bleary, florid and sometimes lyrical film that could stand to be doused by a bucket of ice water.
At the very least, there's no denying that Stewart has artistic conviction. That's more than one can say about lots of other projects orbiting the festival's main selection. After the screening, I wandered downstairs to the festival's concurrent marketplace, the Marché du Film, where sales rights are negotiated and budgets hopefully secured, and saw producers giddily capitalizing on classic IP that's recently gone into the public domain. One studio was hawking 'Bambi: The Reckoning,' 'Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble,' and 'Pinocchio Unstrung,' whose tagline teased, 'There's nothing holding him back.' Who knows, maybe they'll be brilliant?
My most-anticipated film of the festival was Julia Ducournau's 'Alpha.' The French provocateur won 2021's Palme d'Or for her 'Titane,' a piece of unhinged auto-erotica about a model-slash-serial-killer who gets turned on by cars. Ducournau had launched her career here in 2016 with her gory coming-of-age cannibal film 'Raw.' (I caught up with 'Raw' at its infamous midnight screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, where so many people collapsed that someone called an ambulance.)
Before I could watch 'Alpha,' I caught Charlie Polinger's 'The Plague,' a solid body-horror movie about bullies at a preteen water-polo summer camp, which I half-praised by telling someone it was like Ducournau for kids. To my surprise, 'The Plague' and 'Alpha' turned out to share the exact same scene: a 13-year-old social pariah getting beaten up in a swimming pool and bleeding into the water. Maybe I undersold Polinger as 'Raw' 101, or maybe Ducournau is regressing.
'Alpha,' a hazy sci-fi drama, putters after a young girl (Mélissa Boros) who may have gotten herself infected by an unnamed contagion that turns its victims into marble. Her mother (Golshifteh Farahani, great) is a doctor at the hospital where the beds are filled with victims whose faces are petrified into ghastly rictuses. Imagine a plague of Pietàs. Elliptical and dull, 'Alpha' veers between the teenager's indolent storyline and the mom's desperation to rescue both her child and her toxic brother (Tahar Rahim), a mangy, charismatic addict.
Only the sibling story is interesting. Rahim has the kind of prominent ribs and veins that were made for statuary. He lives as though he doesn't intend to grow old and when he coughs, we see suspicious puffs of dust. I think Ducournau wants us to ask if we can ever love someone so much as agree to let them die. But she has a hard time getting around to that point. Heavy violins do too much of the talking.
Ultimately, so does the score of Lee's 'Highest 2 Lowest.' Washington is good as the music mogul weighing whether to pay the exorbitant ransom — no one does bristly better — yet his crisis scenes are so deluged by heaving strings and harps that you can't hear his character think. I desperately wanted to watch the film on mute. But the French subtitles were wonderful. (When Jeffrey Wright, playing Washington's chauffeur, said 'Easy B,' the translation read, 'Cool Abdul.')
The second half of the film is simpler and stronger, with a terrific supporting performance by ASAP Rocky as a rapper named Yung Felon. Once it was clear that Lee wasn't as interested in Kurosawa's themes of inequity and despair — that this would be a story of redemption by any means necessary — I wound up liking it simply because Lee is loud about what he loves (and hates). The title comes up over a blue sky in orange font and goes on to insult the Celtics as much as possible. (If the Knicks end up facing the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA Finals, the music cue Lee will regret is that opening blast of 'Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'' from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Oklahoma!')
Have I seen this year's Oscar contenders? I don't think so. But I've seen plenty of directors presenting exactly the movie they damned well please. And that alone is worth making like Lee and cupping my own hands around my mouth for an enthusiastic yell.
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