Lido life

It had all been a huge mistake. Despite the email trail seemingly providing evidence to the contrary, my press accreditation for the 2010 incarnation of the Venice Film Festival had in fact not been approved, meaning I would have no greater right or opportunity to watch any of the myriad films playing over the course of the next 11 days than that bloke who lives in the skip at the end of my street back in London.

From that stupefying low of despair, things only dive-bombed to a fresh nadir as on Saturday the 4th of September I had to conduct an interview with director Antony Cordier, whose partner-swapping comedy-drama Happy Few is one of the contender's for this year's top prize at Venice, the Golden Lion. The encounter between journalist and filmmaker ran out of steam with the inevitable swiftness you might expect such a deflation to occur when the interrogator has not seen the movie which is the subject of their attempted interrogation.

Yes, thus was the anxiety dream my subconscious cruelly chose to bushwhack me with on my first night in Venice, with it mercifully failing to harden into reality when I arrived at the ground floor of the Palazzo del Casinò to collect my press pass the following morning. Indeed within an hour-and-a-half of getting my grubby paws on my royal blue 'periodicals' badge I was sat in the Sala Perla cinema upstairs in the same building – a high-ceilinged, 1970s conception of luxury - watching Robert Rodriguez' Machete, one of the most-hyped movies playing at this year's festival. Although a curious footnote to the above-described dream is that as my scheduled interview with Cordier is not till later today, I have no idea what he looks like. Consequently in my nocturnal imaginings he appeared in the shape of Italian actor Silvio Orlando, the star of in-competition comedy La Passione, posters for which are plastered around the festival site; each one sheet bearing the fizzog of Orlando, he wearing a bemused expression that clearly suggested to some latent part of my feeble mind he would be suitable to play a director baffled by the idiot who had shown up to talk to him without having seen his movie.

While the starry action of the film festival takes place on the island of the Lido di Venezia, a stretch of land as long and narrow as Adrien Brody's nose, the Indie Movies team are stationed in Venice itself - as in the Venice of atmospheric narrow passageways and snarling gargoyles seen on screen in the likes of Don't Look Now. Although Don't Look Now would match even more closely to our experiences in this section of Venice if Donald Sutherland's quest to catch up with the red coat-wearing figure he believes to be his dead daughter had continually and unfailingly been thwarted by multitudes of lollygagging tourists, all moving with all the urgency of a depressed hedgehog and offering as much opportunity to manoeuvre around them as that granted by a squatting elephant. We arrived in the city the day before the festival commenced, walking out of the airport front entrance and straight onto a quayside, where a water taxi was waiting to ferry us across the lagoon to Venice itself. As our ride bore us closer to our destination, we reacted as everyone arriving in Venice in a movie does; getting to our feet and resting our elbows on the low roof of the boat, gazing upwards in vacant wonder at this historic settlement rising up out of the water.

The Lido is reached by a 30-minute water bus ride from the city, with the former far more closely resembling a typical European beach town than the rest of Venice, the weaving waterways being supplanted by boring old roads. Despite its reputation as a millionaires' resort - something the stunning villas facing onto the Adriatic seemingly attest to – there are few of the more-money-than-taste boutiques that cluttered up the seafront at Cannes, with the retail outlets instead tending to specialise in seaside fare, such as garish towels and red and yellow footballs so light as to make a Jabulani World Cup ball seem as weighty as a gravestone in comparison.

The festival site is situated on the Adriatic side of the island, and is for the present a scene of utter pandemonium. Looking more like a construction site than an internationally-renowned arts event, the organisers in currently in the throes of major rebuilding work, owing to the alarming discovery of asbestos in some of the buildings. The work is not due to be completed till 2012, though the clutter has apparently not deterred the stars from attending, with Natalie Portman having graced the red carpet on the opening night in honour of Black Swan (a movie Emma absolutely bloody loved). Some of the accoutrements dotted around the place are actually quite cool, like the Venice logo over the front of the Palazzo del Cinema where the gala screenings take place being rendered in tessellated red blocks, or the life-size golden lions dotted around the place (actually they're more of a weathered greeny-brown than gold), and you suspect that with some crafty framing work any television coverage will be able to quietly excise the construction chaos in favour of focusing on such isolated niceties.

One area the TV crews will be sure to steer clear of is the periphery of the 'movie village', a hastily erected encampment round the back of the main two buildings, featuring a cafe, a few merchandise stalls, a box office for those local residents wanting to score tickets for the movies (one of the cool things about Venice compared to Cannes is that regular folks get a decent shot at seeing the featured films) and a toilet section comprised of those chemical lavatories you would more expect to see at a music festival than the world's most venerable cinematic showcase. Basically anyone unfortunate enough to need to crap in one of these bad boys is going to find themselves pooping onto a sheet of aluminium, with the 'flushing' process, such as it is, then consisting of using a lever to crank the freshly-produced turd away on some kind of conveyor belt. One can only hope and pray that fragrant movie star Natalie Portman did not visit the portaloos during her visit to Venice 2010, lest she risked witnessing a sight more horrific than Hayden Christensen's attempts at emoting in Star Wars Episode II.

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