Festival Goers Are Grossed Out By Having To Give A Saliva Sample To Attend Cannes

We can now add spittle to the list of things the Cannes Film Festival attendees deem to be more repugnant than Roman Polanski. According to Variety, festival attendees arriving from outside of the EU are being required to visit The Drool Tent, or La Tente de Bave, if you will, to provide a saliva sample to be tested for COVID-19 before attending any events inside the Palais. Festival-goers have described the process as “really gross” but then turn around and watch Tilda Swinton in a movie about a woman suffering from “exploding head syndrome,” (via IndieWire) or worse, a movie starring Simon Rex! Yes, old Dirt Nasty himself has a movie at Cannes this year and Roman Polanski does not. The earth is healing.

Last year, the Cannes Film Festival was cannescelled for the first time since World War II because of the pandemic. But it’s back this year, with a few precautions being taken. In order to attend events in the Palais (but not the screening rooms), guests are required to either show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test. EU residents have their vaccination status tracked with a barcode. But attendees from developing nations such as The United States only have a little piece of flimsy paper with library stamps on it to prove their vaccination status. So they must be tested every 48 hours if they want to participate in a Q&A with Simon Rex. Variety reports:

French laws require that those who gather indoors either must be vaccinated or show proof of a PCR test. But because of the limitations of an app that the French government uses that allows citizens to show they’ve been vaccinated, those coming to Cannes from countries outside of the European Union’s COVID-19 tracking system — including the United States, Canada, England and all of Asia — won’t have a transferable bar code to show they’ve been vaccinated.

Thus, they’ll essentially be treated as if they haven’t been vaccinated. The mandate has already led to confusion — and complaints — from festival-goers on the ground.

In Cannes, the saliva test will be the preferred method of checking for COVID by Biogroup, the laboratory hired to fight the spread of the virus that has killed 4 million people around the world. But while the process didn’t involve sticking a swab up her nostrils, it wasn’t so easy.

“It was difficult for me,” Wilson says. “I couldn’t produce enough saliva.” She estimated that she had to spit “more than 15 times” before she’d collected enough of a sample.

Hours before the festival’s launch on Tuesday, the scene at the makeshift COVID testing center just steps away from where Cannes movies premiere was the opposite of glamour. Festival attendees were ushered into a large room that had all the glitz of a polling center. They were handed a plastic container, along with a funnel where they were instructed to aim their spit, while standing behind a socially-distanced partition. Some missed, hitting the floor or their clothes.

Variety adds:

“It has to be liquid,” a laboratory employee instructed. “Foam doesn’t count.”

There were audible sighs of frustration among those waiting in line when they realized just how much saliva the lab needed from them. Festival-goers who didn’t collect enough were sent back to spit some more. And there were other reasons for being disqualified. A Variety reporter witnessed a vial of spit being discarded because someone had coughed up a piece of food, thus contaminating the sample.

This pandemic has really brought the French elite low. Before they were worried about women wearing sensible shoes and people taking selfies, now there’s an entire tent devoted to saliva kink and drool play.

Here are some pictures from the festival so far including Jury President Spike Lee, Dame Helen Mirren, Bella Hadid, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bong Joon-ho (above), Jodie Foster, Marion Cotillard, and Andie MacDowell.

Pics: Wenn.com