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.

But the stars are still there – and the parties are still there, though fewer of them. The first day I was here, there was a knock on my hotel room door and it was a courier for Dior, carrying a sleek bag containing what was presumably a gown costing tens of thousands of Euros, labelled “Mélanie Laurent” (the French star of many films, most prominently Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.) He had got the wrong room, though I toyed with the idea of pretending I was Mélanie’s assistant, taking the gown and sticking it on eBay.

Later I was at the opening night dinner where I found myself standing next to Jodie Foster, Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard and also Mélanie Laurent looking sensational. Was that the gown, I wondered?

It has to be said that there is not a whole lot of social distancing going on at these events. It’s stricter than a Euro 2020 fanzone in London. But not much. The air kisses are real kisses.

But there is also the unglamorous business of reporting to the Covid testing tent every 48 hours to slobber 1ml of saliva into a tube and drop it off at a special station. These moments are not going to feature in any of the swooning festival montages that play on the TV screens. Do the stars have to do this too? The festival authorities say yes – the rules apply to one and all.

Six hours later you get texted that terrifying thing that now rules your life: the QR code. Trying to get into the Palais means showing this to someone who takes out a special gun-like device and beeps at it. You never get successfully beeped in first time. There is a tense beep … beep … beep … will you be allowed in? Or have to queue up outside the testing station in the burning sun to do it all over again?

And the traditional crowd of people in the streets holding up handwritten signs, begging delegates for tickets, has gone. There are no paper tickets. You get electronic ones sent to you online. And even getting into press screenings requires e-tickets – and that requires going on to the special ticket webpage which is like logging on the Glastonbury site the day before it starts trying to buy a meet-and-greet package with Coldplay. And the traditional press-dossier programmes for each film that were left in our little pigeonholes – handsome brochures like the ones you pay 10 quid for in London West End theatres – have gone. The pigeonholes, or “casiers de presse” have also disappeared, perhaps never to return.

But we are all so happy to be here that it doesn’t matter.