CANNES • Cannes - the glamour, the pop of champagne corks, the endless parties... and now the dawn chorus of Hollywood stars hocking up to spit into plastic funnels.

The new ritual is the latest addition to the layers of ceremony that surround the world's biggest film festival.

Every day, thousands of festivalgoers - from the highest-paid actor to the humblest film blogger - have to undergo Cannes' "gross" Covid-19 spit tests.

Everyone from outside the European Union is subject to the indignity if they want to set foot in the Palais des Festivals, where all the red-carpet premieres are held.

Americans have found the experience particularly humiliating, with the movie industry publication Variety branding the tests "disgusting".

"You need to spit in a plastic tube over and over again even if you've been vaccinated," wrote its executive editor Ramin Setoodeh. "And it's gross and surprisingly difficult."

Mr Setoodeh was "ushered into a large room and handed a plastic container, along with a funnel... and instructed to aim your spit behind a socially distanced partition. Some missed, hitting the floor or their clothes".

Many, like The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw, could not summon up enough spittle after trudging through crowds on the baking sea-front road, the Croisette.

"Spitting into a plastic cup doesn't exactly say the glamour of the Cannes film festival," he said, after the festival was cancelled last year because of the pandemic.

"No one is exempt. Everybody has to submit to the rules," Cannes director Thierry Fremaux insisted, even the biggest names.

As of Tuesday night, none of the thousands of movers and shakers who have descended on the Croisette had tested positive, biologist Guillaume Armana said. "But we have to be careful. The place is hopping and we know that the Delta variant is there," he warned.

But the question remains, "what are they going to do with all the spit they're collecting", asked renowned British critic and historian Jonathan Romney, another visitor forced to queue and hock up every other day, because of Brexit.

"I hear they're saving it up in a big tank for Gaspar Noe to use in the special effects of his next film," he joked, referring to the abundance of bodily fluids in the movies of the notorious director of Climax (2018), whose latest feature, Vortex, is also premiering at Cannes.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE