Cannes, Hollywood blockbusters in hot lip-lock

Cannes, May 16: On Monday afternoon, a pretty girl in a brown shift dress, high boots and red lipstick, one amongst many young boys and girls who are always standing outside the Palais des Festivals holding up requests for tickets, broke into an impromptu jig on the Croisette, Cannes’ main road, when someone obliged.

She jumped, swayed and shrieked waving the ticket, reminding me of the Cadbury girl on an Indian cricket field many years ago.

It was a spontaneous display of love for the movies that no one probably captured on camera. But it’s a moment I won’t ever forget. It was also a moment that marked a brief shift in the festival. The Cannes Film Festival, which has been cel- ebrating high-brow cinema and the best of masters from across the world for over a week now, was in hot, but brief lip-lock with Hollywood blockbusters. In one walloping blast, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlasman, Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built and Solo: A Star Wars Story, directed by Ron Howard, opened to serpentine queues over two days.

Spike Lee’s gorgeous, buoyant and very political BlacKkKlasman, starring John David Washington, Adam Driver and Topher Grace, opens with the Battle of Atlanta scene from Gone With The Wind (1939), complete with the Confederate flag fluttering proudly. Having shown a nation’s history and symbol that is at once about white pride and black oppression, Lee’s film gets down to business, switching to a tone that is both comic and sarcastic.

That tone is set by Alec Baldwin with a Trump imitation about making America great again, railing against integration with an “inferior race” to create a “mongrel nation”, about the ordained “supremacy of white Protestant values”.