The face mask has become the most ubiquitous accessory at this year’s event and makes it difficult to know who’s who
Cannes is a place for faces – for preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet. But this year there is a new accessory: the face mask. It makes the traditional business of recognising people that much harder.
This year in the lobby of my hotel, I noticed a diminutive, dapper man standing with friends unassumingly by the hand-sanitiser machine. Above his mask, he had great big black glasses and what looked like a sailor’s cap: I was about to bowl up to him and ask where the free copies of Screen International were to be found, when I sensed the force-field around him thicken and his retinue warily scope me out.
It was Spike Lee. Asking about free copies of Screen International would not, under the circumstances, be entirely appropriate.
Covid has made this a weirder Cannes, but the new restrictions actually intensify the relief and even the euphoria that it is all back on. Though things are different. On the red carpet, vague fist-bumps or elbow-thumps morph balletically halfway into elaborately performative non-touch embraces.
