1.
The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001). Image courtesy of Universal Studios.
There is a theorem that governs the Cannes Film Festival, one that, no matter how much we try to deny, always remains: the program, for good or for bad, will always find a way to surprise us. Not gently, not apologetically, but with the blunt, almost comic force of something arriving from a direction you had ruled out.
One arrives at the festival—as critic, programmer, distributor, whatever—each year, having made your peace with the unpredictable, and each year the festival finds a new category of unpredictable that your peace had not accounted for. You think you have learned to expect the unexpected. And then the Cannes Classics section announces a random 25th anniversary screening of the 2001 original The Fast and the Furious as a headline event of the 2026 edition, and you understand, with the humility of a repeat student failing a class yet again, that you have learned nothing at all.
The announcement landed on the festival with the energy of a NOS injection into a 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse: sudden, loud, and producing a sensation somewhere between exhilaration and concern over what is happening to the engine. It took everyone by surprise, from announcement through the screening: the accredited press who spent the festival’s first days quietly assembling their mental hierarchies of what constitutes serious cinema worthy of the Croisette showed surprise whenever anyone said they would be attending The Fast and the Furious…in Cannes. And you can understand that reaction; the Classics section is not typically where one goes to reckon with franchise cinema. It is where one encounters a newly restore previously unknown noir from the Soviet era, or a film by a director whose name you don’t know but whose reputation, you’ve been made to understand, is considerable. It is not, historically speaking, where you go to watch Vin Diesel shift gears in the name of family.
Nevertheless: bold curation, Cannes. The argument for The Fast and the Furious as a legitimate object of Cannes Classics attention is, once you permit yourself to make it, surprisingly easy to construct. By any honest accounting, the film is a foundational document of Hollywood's 21st century. It arrived in 2001 carrying the DNA of a heist film, the skeleton of a western, the musculature of a B-series action picture, and the beating heart of something else entirely: a film about honor and brotherhood, somehow a deep analysis of masculine relationships; about the strange tenderness that men are sometimes only able to express through the shared worship of internal combustion engines. From this unlikely combination, it spawned a franchise that has not merely survived but expanded, sequel by sequel, into the largest and most improbable mythology that Hollywood has produced in the modern era.
The screening was announced for midnight, the correct hour, morally and atmospherically speaking. It would take place at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the biggest screen in the city, and would be attended by members of the original cast, the director Rob Cohen, and by Vin Diesel, who arrived on the red carpet wearing a custom jacket on which the words FAST FOREVER had been embroidered with a level of commitment that suggested the sentiment had been sitting inside him for some time, waiting for the appropriate textile to express itself.
What the jacket did not communicate, and what the evening proceeded to complicate at considerable length, was any particular relationship to speed in the strictly ambulatory sense. Diesel walked that red carpet at a pace that could be described as contemplative, reverent, and ceremonial—not quite at the languid extreme of Lee Khang-sheng’s Walker Series, but not so far from that of a royal coronation. He began signing autographs twenty meters from the entrance as if the red carpet were merely a suggestion of a direction rather than a corridor with a specific destination and an audience waiting at its end. Each signature appeared to be executed with care, with presence, with the full attention of a man who understood that the person experiencing this signing would remember it for the rest of their life. And by “the person,” I mean Vin himself.
Security gestured. Diesel smiled. The queue inside, assembled in gowns and freshly pressed tuxedos, consulted their phones with the patient resignation of people who have come to understand that some events simply have their own gravitational field. FAST FOREVER, said the jacket. Not just yet, replied Vin to the red carpet.
I arrived at the screening in my own accustomed nonchalant rhythm, convinced that the film would have begun without me. I had not taken into account something I should have known: that an event of this particular character does not begin until it is ready, and that readiness, in this case, was a condition that would be achieved approximately 50 minutes after the announced start time. By the time I found my seat, eighteen minutes after the originally scheduled hour and an arrival that turned out to be luxuriously early, the theater was full, the mood was extraordinary, and the red carpet was still in the process of receiving Vin Diesel at whatever pace Diesel had decided was appropriate for this occasion; that is, after every photo of his face in town was adorned with his signature.
The audience assembled that night was one of the more genuinely strange and wonderful combinations I have encountered in a decade of attending this festival. The room had been opened to what felt like a wider and younger crowd than the main competition premieres typically attract. While people were in the usual shining dresses and impeccably ironed formalwear, they were behaving, collectively, as though they had not only never been in the Lumière, but might never have been in any movie theater before, and had decided that this was the moment to experience the full available range of human responses to being in one. Something specific was happening in the atmosphere of that room, something I have not encountered in quite this configuration before: the sensation of people who knew they were inside a historic night and had decided to treat every available surface as if they were visiting the ancient ruins of an old civilization that they desperately needed to remember.
Meanwhile, Diesel kept expanding time, stretching each available moment outward, refusing the compression that the festival schedule was requesting of him. He was playing with the clock not out of disregard but out of something closer to its opposite: a profound awareness that this specific configuration of this specific night would not happen again, and a determination to inhabit every second of it before releasing it to the past.
When he finally reached Thierry Frémaux at the top of the carpeted staircase the star slowly entered the crowded theater with the practiced equanimity of a one who over many thousand such occasions had dreamed about this moment. Before the festival’s general delegate and public figurehead introduced the screening, Diesel requested the microphone. His desire was granted and from his seat Diesel delivered one of the longest speeches I have witnessed at this festival by an auteur presenting a film.
The star spoke with a voice that was audibly compromised by emotion, which he did not attempt to disguise or manage. After honoring his team, especially Paul Walker, he proceeded to tell a story, first apologizing to Frémaux for doing so without his permission. Earlier that day, Diesel had been approached by Frémaux at the festival lunch. The general delegate told him how happy he was to finally show in Cannes this amazing action classic, but he didn’t stop there. Frémaux said that they knew that Vin Diesel had come to Cannes many years ago with only a small bag, but one full of dreams, carrying a short film to show at the festival—presumably the 1995’s Diesel-directed short film, Multi-Facial. And it was because of this trip long ago that something was being honored that night, because for Frémaux, Vin Diesel and The Fast and the Furious had ultimately been born at Cannes. And that this screening, this recognition, this placing of the film in the company of classics, was the closing of a circle that had been open for 25 years. At this point at the midnight screening, Frémaux, who had been nodding from the side of the stage, was temporarily lost to the applause.
The film began at something approaching one in the morning. While the Cannes Classic sections tends to spotlight new restorations in magnificent resolutions, to be honest—and I think honesty is appropriate here—this copy of The Fast and the Furious was not a pristine archival object in the strictest technical sense or by any casual definition. In fact, it resembled something closer to a projected DVD of the film, but nobody in that audience, not one person in that packed theater at one in the morning, seemed to care. The screening operated according to the logic of the midnight American tradition, one in which the film is almost secondary and everything is a celebration surrounding its presence. Every gear shift was received as a gift. Every appearance of Paul Walker on screen arrived with a weight that was entirely separate from nostalgia, but instead was honorific celebration. Every name in the credits produced its own small ovation. The audience behaved as if it had been waiting for this encounter for years and found, to their surprise, that it had been waiting for them. Which, in a sense, it had. For 25 years The Fast and the Furious had been waiting, dismissed, absorbed, memed, franchised, expanded beyond all original recognition, to be seen, once, in a room this size, at this hour, by an audience willing to let it be what it actually was at the most prestigious film festival in the world.
The film that made the heist-western-action spiral into a mythology of honor and manhood. The film that the meme culture half-ironically reframed around the concept of family, until the irony wore away and only the concept remained. It finally got its recognition, its vindication, its night at Cannes. The circle closed somewhere around three in the morning, in the dark, to the sound of a full theater applauding the closing credits.
2.
Shadows of Artavazd Pelechian (far left) and Thierry Frémaux (center). Photo by the author.
There is also another Cannes. One of many, in fact, because the festival is not a single event but a collection of simultaneous events occupying the same city and the same two weeks, intersecting unpredictably, occasionally contradicting each other with the cheerful indifference of a program that knows it contains multitudes. This other Cannes happens far from the photographers' flashes and the embroidered declarations of velocity, though if you look carefully you can still find bow ties and sparkling evening gowns, slightly less pressed, slightly more earnest. This Cannes happens on the top floor of the Grand Palais, in what could reasonably be described as the attic of the international art house cinema world, a place that functions, as all good attics must, as a site of storage, of memory, and of the carefully preserved things that the floors below have not yet figured out how to properly value.
Nowadays every attic can be an Airbnb, and one does sometimes wonder about the eventual commercial fate of this particular space. (I personally can’t wait to see when you can book a room here in a couple of years; it would certainly cut down the length of travel time to screenings.) But in the Hollywood imaginary—and this is a festival that operates in constant, productive tension between the Hollywood imaginary and every other imaginary available to world cinema—an attic is something specific: a place for the forgotten, for the things that outlasted their moment and are waiting to be rediscovered by someone willing to climb the stairs.
The Salle Buñuel can be found up there, appearing like a thought you had on the way to somewhere else, and then stopped to examine, and found more interesting than your original destination. It is small, among the smallest of the official screening rooms at the festival, and shaped like a university auditorium that has developed philosophical pretensions over the years. Queues outside it are tight because the space permits no other kind. The audience that fills it tends toward a specific and recognizable combination: the hardcore cinephile programmers and critics who nod at each other in the queue with the economical recognition of people who know they are members of a society whose membership requirements are not widely advertised; and, increasingly in recent editions, the young participants of the festival's educational program. These teenagers are given three days of access to Cannes and its screenings, and arrive in their gala outfits to watch, for example, the most recent restoration of a soon-to-be-canonized Taiwanese pre-slasher noir from the late 1970s, with the seriousness of initiates receiving a transmission they do not yet fully understand but are already committed to. This audience combination should not work, but it does.
This year, the Buñuel hosted the Pelechian Project: five restored short films by the Armenian master Artavazd Pelechian, presented in collaboration between Cineteca Bologna and the Coproduction Office, spanning from his earliest student works at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography through to The Seasons (1975), his most celebrated and distributed film, the one that those who know his work tend to mention first, with the slightly proprietary pride of people who feel they discovered something before the rest of the world got around to it. Pelechian himself was present, having traveled to Cannes for the occasion, and he made his way to his seat at a pace entirely suited to a man who has spent his career making films about the nature of duration and the way that time moves through images and between them. The audience in the queue caught glimpses of him as he passed, and those who recognized him began to applaud. The wave of recognition moved through the line as those who had been looking at their phones peered up, searching with slightly desperate hopefulness to catch a glimpse of any celebrity whose attendance had gone viral in the past hours, and finding instead a tall, slender, and fragile 88-year-old Armenian man.
Inside, Frémaux was again present, and conducted the introduction with the manner of someone presiding over an occasion he had been quietly looking forward to. He began, as a teacher might begin, with a diagnostic question: how many people in this room had seen a film by Artavazd Pelechian before? The number of raised hands was, to put it gently, modest. Frémaux was visibly surprised, as were many in the audience. Pelechian’s work was known and cinephilia still may stand a chance.
Then Pelechian slowly took the stage. He spoke in Armenian, through translation, briefly and carefully, in the manner of a man who has always been more interested in images than in words but who can, when required, construct a sentence that illuminates a decade of thinking. He gave a brief lecture. He spoke about the chronology of the works, about how the films we would see would trace his working process from its beginnings, from the moment when he was working through the montage ideas of Sergei Eisenstein and finding in them something masterful that he nevertheless felt did not quite belong to him, did not fit the shape of what he needed to say. And so he began to develop something else, a methodology of his own. A blackboard would have been useful at this point, because as every serious montage theorist eventually discovers, the ideas want mathematics for illustration. Is cinema not, at the end, an equation? Is that not why we speak of formula films, of the calculation of effect, of the precise algebra of editing rhythm?
The standard equation, the one Eisenstein had formalized, was something like: image plus image equals a meaning. The collision of two images producing a third image, the idea that lives in the gap. In his youth, Pelechian looked at this equation and felt, without being quite able to articulate it yet, that something was missing, or rather, that something was present in it that should not be. The addition sign. The joining. He did not want to join images. He wanted to separate them. To place them at a distance from each other and see what lived in that distance, in that interval, in the space between things that the eye and the mind could not help but try to cross. Not montage as collision, but montage as separation. The meaning does not live in the joining but in the splitting. And is cinema not precisely that, the thing that lives between two frames? The inexpressible interval that leads us, frame by frame, into infinite worlds assembled from disjunction?
As the translation brought this into French for the assembled audience, and as Frémaux nodded from the side of the stage with the slow, private agreement of someone hearing a mentor articulate something he had always half-believed, the films were almost beside the point. Almost. Because then they began. And the films are not beside the point. The films are everything. Works that, produced today in the current conditions of the film economy and the festival industrial complex, might struggle to even find a screening in a film club. Works that the passage of time has slowly, with the indifference that time brings to all its projects of vindication, elevated into something that can only be shown in a room like this, with this kind of silence, with this quality of attention. Their power is not diminished by the small screen. If anything, the intimacy of the Buñuel amplified it, the way a small room can sometimes make a sound larger than any concert hall, and with this private proximity allow the audience to to lose themselves in the ineffable distance between two frames.
One film closes a circle. The others open a distance. One man walks a red carpet as slowly as physics will allow, in a jacket that says FAST FOREVER, honoring 25 years of speed by temporarily refusing it. Another man walks on a similar rhythm to a seat in a small upstairs room and speaks, quietly, about the cinema of the gap, the cinema of what happens between images when you give them space to breathe. A moment to meditate on how much time is needed in let films grow in time instead of working with the immediate reactions.
Both were, in their way, talking about the same thing: what time does to cinema when you let it. What cinema does to time when it knows what it is doing. And what happens, in a theater at midnight, or in a small attic room, or in the impossible space between two frames, when an audience gives itself over completely to the act of watching, and finds, waiting there in the dark, something it had not expected to find.
The circle closes. The distance opens. The program, as it always does, contains more than it announces.