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Cannes: Premium Diesel
The Fast and The Furious It’s one of my closely held festival precepts that the odds of seeing a great film are much improved by making a beeline for the restorations and revivals. These are films that have endured beyond just one turn of the festival hamster wheel, their merits as art or artifact more or less established. Although a festival is first and foremost a showcase of things new and notable, sometimes the thought of enduring another two-plus hours of likely tepid drama is too much to countenance, and only a surefire prospect will do.That is why, despite the incredulity of my more seasoned yet still less cynical colleagues, I felt compelled last Wednesday to upend my circadian rhythms for the Cannes midnight showing of The Fast and The Furious, held in honor of its 25th anniversary.
In a festival edition conspicuous for the total absence of Hollywood premieres, the inclusion of Rob Cohen’s franchise-spawning, street-racing juggernaut in the Official Selection strikes as a kind of cool-mom conciliatory gesture. (In the same vein: also playing that night, at the Cinéma de la Plage, was Top Gun—evoking memories of Cruise on the Croisette at the fighter jet–augmented launch of Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, plus the Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning premiere just last year.) No one present was more starry-eyed, however, than Vin Diesel, a.k.a. the franchise’s muscled-up, muscle-teed patriarch, Dominic Toretto. “Vin, we are waiting for you on the stairs, please,” intoned an announcement outside the Grand Théâtre Lumière, Cannes’s flagship venue. Having already traversed the red carpet, co-stars Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster, together with Meadow Walker, daughter of the late Paul Walker, were lingering anticipatory outside the theater alongside Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s General Delegate, and President Iris Knobloch. Diesel’s presence was required for a triumphal group photo, but he was still basking in the attention of the photographers and fans below, making sure to get plenty of mileage out of a blazer diamante-encrusted with the promise, “FAST FOREVER.” (It’s not an idle one, it seems: while the franchise’s “final” installment is slated for 2028, a total of four—count ’em—spin-off TV series are currently in the works at Peacock.)
Inside the theater, an emotional Diesel addressed the 2300-odd revved-up attendees. Though The Fast and the Furious was not technically part of the festival’s “Classics” sidebar, evidently no one had had the heart to tell its star, who made multiple references to the film’s Cannes–minted “classic” status. In his slow, sonorous cadences, worthy of a Zen benediction, the New York–born former bouncer went on to reminisce about his first visit to the world’s most prestigious festival, in 1995: aged 28, he was then the unknown writer, producer, director, and star of the 20-minute short Multi-Facial. “You, Vin, were born in Cannes,” Frémaux had apparently told him over lunch earlier in the day. Standing there in the Lumière, he appeared born again, moved to tears by the gaudy occasion, as entwined with the memory of Walker—who died in a high-speed single-car collision in 2013, during the making of Furious 7. “This is the film where brotherhood was introduced to our millennium by myself and my brother Pablo,” Diesel proclaimed, referring to Walker by a pet name. It was after midnight; again, not an hour for fact-checking.
By the time the film commenced—mildly delirious from a long day of queuing and imbibing coffee and cinema, battered by the pomp and circumstance of the situation—I was almost ready to believe it. Like Dom Toretto, I was at that point “living my life one quarter-mile at a time.” Especially with the knowledge of the stupidly high stakes ratcheted up by the subsequent Fast films (literally astronomical in 2021’s Fast 9), their thrills neutered by rampant digitalization, on rewatch this first incarnation exuded a highly calibrated, hypnotic quality: a kind of Michael Mann for meatheads (complimentary).
Charmingly, the plot revolves around nothing more than a few trucks’-worth of stolen VCRs and DVD players. The LAPD suspects Dom and his crew have a hand in this series of heists, and charges Walker’s Officer Brian O’Conner with the task of infiltrating their tight-knit inner circle. While the explosive circumstances of Walker’s death intimate his possible confusion of reality with a Fast & Furious movie, one can easily draw a line from his performance as Brian—wherein determination, anger, and lust are expressed via the same furrowed-brow glare, electrified by Fremen-blue eyes—back to his origins on The Young and the Restless, in which he appeared in 1993. And like that alarmingly long-running soap (it launched in 1973), the Fast & Furious franchise has remained at its core a byzantine family melodrama—but perhaps never so strangely sultry as in its first outing.
By the time the credits rolled and Diesel brought his second round of soliloquizing to a close, it was nearly 3 a.m. I would rise before 7 in order to book another batch of tickets to hot rod–less films, secure in my choice of late-night programming but now emboldened to venture beyond the “classics.”
