Despite the presence in each of them in the figure of a kidnapping, nothing seems to connect these two films, beyond the fact that they have, with a completely different light, illuminated the Cannes Festival that invited them. And yet …
The possibility of traveling from the Iranian filmmaker is in itself a happy news, that the concern for the concern for the radicality of his attack on the Iranian regime can lead to his return home. Another phenomenon of a different nature, the cinematographic vigor of Spike Lee coats the choices of stories and staging less harmless than it seems.
It is also this heterogeneity that makes the dynamics of the Cannes demonstration. But he ends up emerging how much, both of his own place, one and the other are even further questioning agents than they seemed to be.
“A simple accident”, by Jafar Panahi (in competition)
Extreme is the contradiction between the joy of the arrival of Jafar Panahi, finally present at a festival where one of his films is shown-after fifteen years of impossibility of traveling-, and the darkness of what evokes, with an unusual frontality in the Iranian director, his eleventh feature film.
By chance, a man believes to recognize the one who was his torturer when he was imprisoned. Seeking to confirm his suspicion, he aggregates around him, and that which he has kidnapped, very different characters, by their social position as by their relationship with what they have in common: to have been imprisoned for political reasons and subjected to torture.
In the white van of the craftsman Vahid, made fragile by his prison experience, thus find herself an intellectual, an activist enraged with desire for revenge against what he suffered, a young woman who is about to marry, leaving behind an excruciating experience.
A simple accident
is a film built on several suspense. Is the man tied up at the back of the van is the torturer that believed to identify Vahid? And in this case, what should we do with it? But the film also questions the way in which those who have gone through the test of repression live daily. And the general state of a society where, without common organization or program, forms of resistance are multiplying.
This synopsis could be that of a didactic film, or a moral play, which reflects on good and evil, responsibility, legality, forgiveness or revenge, in the vein of Dirty hands by Jean-Paul Sartre or Just Albert Camus.
It is also that. But above all, it is, above all, a moving film, at the same time as a translation by artistic means of an experience actually lived by its author. The impressive power ofA simple accident Detches by the convergence of two forces which simultaneously live in today’s Jafar Panahi.
New and different is this strength from the prison experience, which the Iranian filmmaker has suffered twice. It was above all his second incarceration, which he ended up leaving after seven months thanks to a hunger strike and a vast international mobilization, which inspired the evocation of what is happening in the jails of the Islamic Republic.
And, even more than his own fate, that of his cell companions, often even worse. And who, for many, have still not left. Singular energy born from this experience merges with the dynamic meaning of the story of the director of White balloon (Gold Camera in 1995) and Three faces (Prix du Scénario in 2018), the simmering presence of performers, the ability to move from the realism of a street in Tehran to the abstraction of a desert decor that a character will rightly associate with the scene where a particular form of the play would be played While waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett).
Circulating with ease of dreamlike realism, between daily images which testify to the declines of the regime-notably the wearing of the scarf-and formal biases working the duration of the plans and the colors, the film thus finds a tone which carries beyond the only denunciation, relentless, of the atrocities committed by the Iranian State.
Because what stages A simple accidentthe film most head -on in revolt against the situation in his country that Jafar Panahi has produced, is not limited to the only denunciation of leaders and henchmen who implement their policy.
What the film actually tells – and in this regard its title is even more an antiphrase – is the way in which violent oppression rots the whole social body, fragments it, distance its victims from each other, also sabots sensitivity, moral landmarks and the ability to live together.
“Highest 2 Lowest”, by Spike Lee (excluding competition)
Assumed to be assumed of a very beautiful film by Akira Kurosawa, not well known, Between heaven and hell (1963), Highest 2 Lowest is apparently a thriller around the kidnapping of a teenager, who opens a violent crisis in the life of a New York black music industry. The film plays with virtuosity of the codes of the kidnapping thriller, suspense, reversals of situation, strategic and emotional choices of the protagonists.
Far from the most openly committed films of Spike Lee, his twenty-fourth feature film seems to testify above all to his know-how of Showman. The know-how is undeniable and, in this case, it produces jubilant effects. But Highest 2 Lowest cannot be summed up.
His first singular bias is due to the way in which almost all (but not all) the protagonists are black, without it being a “subject”, but without evacuating the importance of African-American references. David King, the hero played by Denzel Washington, is a large producer of black music and his luxurious apartment dominating the Brooklyn bridge is lined with works explicitly signed by black American contemporary artists.
It is to choose not to dwell on the racial question, without evacuating it, which makes the singularity of a film which ignores nothing of the phenomena of communitarianism, which in the film also concerns other groups (the Puerto Ricans, the baseball supporters), as besides of the dizzying class cleavages, while refusing to make the unique reading key.
The other contribution of Spike Lee, including compared to the original scenario, is what that when the film should go to its spectacular peak and its resolution, the characters do not do at all that was planned. The progress of the action will thus have as a real summit a battle memorable rap between two men, who are at this moment very male and each endowed with a firearm, a situation which lets emerge much more than the classic test of strength (in VO: showdown) Action films of this kind.
It is something else than a ruse of screenwriter. Remarkably embodied thanks in particular to Denzel Washington and A $ AP Rocky, literally inhabited during this sequence on both sides of a recording studio window, which will continue, in another register, on both sides of the window of a parlor, is the desire to stage what brings together and what distinguishes humans.
This conflict, even more than the many other dramatic springs mobilized by the scenario, feeds the multiple tensions that energetic Highest 2 Lowestand that one could summarize under a word: the “values”. Moral value, financial value, family values, friendly, belonging to distinct groups, a long history as well as contemporary developments are both explicitly cited and dramatically activated to nourish a film much less summarizing to its only action that it seemed.
The apparent absence of “big subject” perhaps explains that such a good film is not part of the competition. It is his way of taking care of multiple issues, society and morality as of narrative form, which nevertheless makes it one of the best achievements of its author and a great spectator.
Released September 5, 2025 on Apple TV+
