100 Bewildering Hours at Cannes

The most glamorous film festival remains unchanged—except for that pesky Delta variant.

- By Rachel Handler

In the days leading up to the 74th annual Cannes Film Festival, I begin to wonder: Am I willing to risk becoming grievously ill in the name of cinema? covid-19 numbers are steadily climbing across Europe, with the mysterious Delta variant seeming to evade the vaccines more successfully than its older, weaker brethren; meanwhile, I am readying myself to sit in crowded, windowless rooms for 12 days straight with thousands of strangers whose vaccination status will remain unknown to me and many of whom are French, i.e., give no fucks. As I roam New York City buying integral supplies (KN95 masks and vegan-leather miniskirts), I send no fewer than 600 panicked messages to my patient editor, imagining all of the ways I might die on the Croisette directly in front of Tilda Swinton.

Somehow, I arrive in Cannes, courtesy of a flight on which I’m seated near a mopey Scandinavian teen who coughs on my head and an Uber driver who exclusively plays deep-house Coldplay remixes. In the weeks before the festival, attendees had received exactly one (1) email from the Cannes press office about covid protocols, written in the opaque and lilting style of all Cannes emails, which tend to evoke an image of a French person laughing maniacally and smoking three cigarettes while typing. “You may enter the Palais only if you can provide a vaccination confirmation,” it begins, “(if you come from the EU).” I read the email many times, then replied, asking if I was to understand that, because my vaccine was not administered in Europe but rather in the filthy trenches of America, I would be required to take covid tests every 48 hours, despite my having gotten the exact same vaccine they were administering in France.