It’s official: Spike Lee’s new film, Highest 2 Lowest will premiere May 19th at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie—a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime procedural/class parable morality play High and Low—reunites Lee with his longtime (and arguably greatest) collaborator, Denzel Washington, who’ll walk Cannes’ red carpet for what festival chief Thierry Fremaux points out is “the first time ever.”
Lee has a long history with the festival, and the 5/19 date is pregnant with meaning for the filmmaker. It’s the 36th anniversary of the Cannes premiere of Lee’s classic Do the Right Thing, the first of five Lee films that have screened there. Lee also previously served as Cannes’ Jury President in 2021, and his last time on the Croisette with a feature film in competition, 2018’s BLACKKKLANSMAN, he won a Grand Prix (and six subsequent Oscar nominations), though this time out his film won’t be in competition.
Highest 2 Lowest, an Apple and A24 collab project, has been highly anticipated since it was announced early last year. It’s Lee’s second remix of an international classic from a master, following his 2013 take on Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy with Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen and Samuel L. Jackson. Highest 2 Lowest arrives amid a late-career resurgence for Lee, and features a cast seemingly ripped from my imagination: Denzel (re-teaming with Lee for the first time in nearly two decades, and their fifth time overall) plus the God Jeffrey Wright, Dean Winters, Ice Spice, and A$AP Rocky.
Kurosawa’s original—itself based on the 1959 cop novel King’s Ransom by Evan Hunter—is a tense and patient film that is largely about men in rooms making difficult choices after being put in dire positions. It interrogates the hierarchies of class and the corrosive effects of capitalism on individuals apart from and within the social fabric of early ‘60s Japanese society. Toshiro Mifune—who made sixteen films with Kurosawa between 1948 and 1965 and is basically the Denzel to his Spike Lee—plays Kingo Gondo, a shoe executive fighting for the integrity of the products his company produces. As Gondo is preparing to push back against the forces of cynical corporate immiseration by committing his entire net worth to a hostile takeover, a case of mistaken identity throws his life and value system into chaos. He gets a call from a kidnapper who claims to be holding his son; when it’s discovered that the kidnapper has actually taken the son of Gondo’s chauffeur—but still wants 30 million yen for his safe return—Gondo is forced to choose whether to sacrifice his career and his wealth or the life of his employee’s child.
Lee has been guarded about details from the film, but has left some bread crumbs along with a few context-clue shots leaked from the set, including an image of A$AP Rocky posing defiantly in a prison jumpsuit. Lee has described Rocky’s character—who, with Spike’s typical subtlety, is named “Yung Felon”—as “the main role in the film.” Denzel’s character—the Mifune part—is now a “music mogul,” and an ultra-gentrified and price-gouged contemporary New York City stands in for postwar Tokyo.
So this is pure speculative fancasting, but Yung Felon sounds suspiciously like a rap moniker. What I’ll guess—in a Friday afternoon blog post you’ll hopefully have forgotten by the likely summer release of this film if I’m wrong—is that like Ginjirô Takeuchi, the devious and envious kidnapper living a life of poverty in Kurosawa’s original, Rakim plays an artist whose career has gone wrong, and holds Denzel’s music exec responsible. Seems likely that Jeffrey Wright plays the chauffeur whose son has been kidnapped by accident and Dean Winters is a nefarious executive trying to ruin Denzel’s record label in an echo of Rappaport’s Bamboozled role. In a just-released image from the film, we see Denzel on the subway, sitting next to a black bag; it’s likely a reprise of the scene from Kurosawa’s film in which Gondo [spoiler alert for a 62-year-old movie] ultimately decides to pay the ransom, putting it in two briefcases and throwing it from a moving train.
The film looks like a natural fit for themes and ideas that Lee has been pursuing his entire career: How race and capitalism shape culture in America, preserving integrity in a society full of institutions designed to rob it from us, and our responsibilities to one another in this barrel of crabs. But we won’t know for sure if any of this amateur guesswork is on the money until extremely lucky critics start firing off obnoxious hyperbolic missives from France in about a month.