She was to be the star of the second week of the Cannes Film Festival, with four films, including three in competition in the queen section, an extremely rare performance.
But Léa Seydoux, tested positive for Covid-19, did not climb the steps of the Palace, this Monday, July 12, with the team of "The French Dispatch", the new film by the American Wes Anderson, which she shares the poster with a host of stars.
The French actress, placed in solitary confinement, tested regularly, will not walk on the red carpet for the Hungarian film "The Story of my Life" either this Thursday, nor probably with Benjamin Biolay, on Friday, her partner in " France ”by Bruno Dumont.
Quite a symbol of a pandemic that we believed to see moving away under the heat of the palm trees and which returns like a boomerang.
Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Mathieu Amalric and Adrien Brody with Wes Anderson: Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch team climbed the steps on Monday without Léa Seydoux, positive for Covid-19.
REUTERS / Eric Gaillard
In a week, everything changed in Cannes.
Monday July 5, opening day before, press conference by the general delegate of the festival, Thierry Frémaux.
Journalists are masked, but protocol requires them to remove it for each question and then put it back.
A strange rule, some joked, renewed the next day, when it was necessary to unmask to question Spike Lee, president of the jury, and the eight personalities who accompany him.
That evening, the long embrace of the filmmaker at the top of the steps with the general delegate, without masks, made some festival-goers tickle, but how to refuse it?
Even outside in the queues
A week later, the question no longer arises. It is out of the question to take off your mask at a press conference when you get up to ask a question. A message from Pierre Lescure, the president of the festival, was re-recorded at the end of last week to more seriously encourage each festival-goer, at the start of each screening, to keep their mask for the duration of the film. The latter also extinguished a controversy related to the dissemination on social networks of a photo with many people with their faces uncovered during the opening night.
Nevertheless: a rout of a large television group, on a sheltered beach terrace, all afternoon, the first few days, left a rather hallucinating image with a very large number of guests touching the button. , even tighter than in the metro at rush hour, without any mask.
How far away that seems.
Recently, the security of the festival even controls the masks outside, in the queues in front of the Palace, which was not the case the first days.
This festival, which was meant to be a solar renaissance, is now hanging on to come to an end in the least bad conditions possible.