Visitors to the Venice film festival are advised to bring a waterproof and keep umbrellas at the ready. The event invariably starts out hot and sunny, but don't be fooled, it will end in storms; it's the same way every time. The thunder cracks and the rains come down and the whole affair takes an autumnal turn.
How fitting that this year's festival should have opened with the electrifying Birdman, in which Michael Keaton's fading old thespian turns his back on the mainstream and sets his sights on high art instead. It was a film that largely set the tone for the 10 days that followed, as lightning flashed, arthouse curios sprouted and big American titles proved to be as rare as hen's teeth. Cannes may be more brash and exciting; Sundance more airy and wholesome. And yet humid, rotting Venice possesses peculiar charms of its own. By the time the storms roll in (middle Sunday, just before midnight), we are positively drowning in decent pictures.
The 2013 edition caught pundits unawares by delivering its crowning Golden Lion award to Gianfranco Rosi's unfancied ringroad documentary Sacro GRA – a decision that suggested home-turf advantage can be pivotal at Venice. This year we have three Italian hopefuls in the main competition. At the time of writing, the smart money was on Black Souls, a turbulent mafia drama about three brothers from a Calabrian crime syndicate. Francesco Munzi's film is rich, dark and impeccably staged. It's a tale that paints southern Italy as a ruined kingdom, poisoned by its past and hopelessly tangled in outmoded ideals of blood and honour. Everyone here is nursing ancient, burning grievances. All of them, you feel, are swiftly riding for a fall.
Might Abel Ferrara's Pasolini qualify as an Italian film too? Heaven forbid; the very notion is heresy. Despite charting the last 24 hours in the life of the great director Pier Paolo Pasolini, it has been shot by a New Yorker and stars Willem Dafoe in the title role, while the bulk of the dialogue is spoken in English. Perhaps it was these flagrant transgressions that accounted for a sniffy reception from the domestic delegates. All the same, I liked this enormously. After the lurid histrionics of his recent Welcome to New York, Ferrara appears to have harnessed his wilder impulses. His Pasolini is fragile, dreamy and sad, shuffling domestic vignettes with vibrant fantasy interludes as it cruises inexorably towards the rocks. Dafoe, too, proves purely terrific as the brilliant, ill-starred man at the centre.
Those of a patriotic stripe were forced to look further afield, in the festival sidebars, where a brace of British productions spotlighted life on the margins. Duane Hopkins's Bypass provided a stylish, polished (perhaps too polished) piece of homegrown miserabilism, casting George MacKay as a sickly petty criminal with a kit-bag full of troubles. But on balance I preferred Blood Cells, in which Jimmy's Hall star Barry Ward plays a kind of modern-day hobo Odysseus, visiting the landmarks of his past as he picks his way painfully back towards the family home. Joseph Bull and Luke Seomore's begrimed rural drama drags its feet on occasion, but it's heartfelt and ambitious and confirms its directors as names to watch out for.
Regrets? We've had a few. Hopes were high for The Cut, a sweeping epic of the Armenian genocide by the talented German-Turkish director Fatih Akin. This looked tremendous on paper but the delivery falls short. Tahar Rahim plays Nazaret, the mute, stoic survivor who goes in search of his daughters in the aftermath of the first world war. He's trudging widescreen landscapes of rock and sand, stooping to dip his pail in a well that turns out to be clogged with corpses. The direction is bullish; the soundtrack enticing. But Akin's film turns out to be as flat and featureless as the Turkish desert itself.
The Cut has no nuance; it never builds and swells the way it should. Instead it keeps nudging poor Nazaret on from one place to the next, ticking off the locations he visits like some endless country and western ballad. He seeks his daughters in Aleppo; he hunts them down in Cuba. He thinks they're in Minneapolis, but they might well have gone out west. I watched the final scenes in an agony of anxiety, half expecting that some shuffling extra was going to tap Nazaret on the shoulder and then direct him on to Perth. Had that happened, we'd probably still be watching The Cut today.
At least Peter Bogdanovich knows the value of not overstaying his welcome. She's Funny That Way is the American director's first feature in 13 years, although it gives the impression of having been scripted at speed, at the end of a joyous, boozy lunch with friends. Bogdanovich's farce is a fun frippery, barely held together by Owen Wilson's drawling comic turn as a theatre impresario who wants to play the role of Pygmalion to the girls he orders from the escort service. Following the screening, I run into Wilson by the tennis courts of his hotel and am relieved to find him as scattily charming as I'd always hoped he would be.
The morning after the storm hits Venice, the first of the delegates begin peeling away. They're abandoning this elegant ruin in favour of the bustling modernity of Toronto, the next event on the circuit. Those that remain are the diehards, the lifers and the wild-eyed stragglers. They come shuffling up the marble stairwells in search of a masterpiece to keep them going. My phone is stolen in the movie village and I can't remember where I put my programme. I feel like some pathetic first-world version of Kurtz, gone upriver in Heart of Darkness, or the demented Japanese soldiers who infest Shinya Tsukamoto's gripping Fires on the Plain. Sad to report that Tsukamoto's soldiers wind up eating one another. If the pizza stall closes, we may well do the same.
In a perfect world, this year's Golden Lion award would go to Roy Andersson's bizarre and bewitching A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Don't be spooked by the title, Andersson's film is a hoot. It's about a pair of glum salesmen travelling to Gothenberg with a suitcase full of monster masks and laughter bags. But it's also about Sweden's 18th-century invasion of Russia, and about a limping barmaid who demands her payment in kisses, and about men who "walk like zombies", and about a bunch of commuters who can't decide whether it's Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. Andersson skirts so many human mysteries and Pigeon plays out as a giddy metaphysical burlesque. It's simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, silly and profound. It is both the finest film I've seen at Venice and the perfect picture for the final days.
Outside the main theatre, the lost souls collide on the walkways and stagger from one door to the next. They can hardly recall what day they're in; they can barely remember what films they have seen. Is it Thursday or is it Tuesday? Soon, fingers crossed, they will all find their way back home.
Rialto bites: the best of the Venice film festival
Best line "We just want to help people have fun," explains one of the hangdog peddlers in A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. It's a line he repeats as a constant refrain (demonstrating plastic Dracula fangs and mask of "Uncle One-Tooth" to a succession of unimpressed shopkeepers) and it becomes perversely more amusing each time it's said. Perhaps the organisers can adopt it as their official festival slogan.
Best restoration The Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker arrived at the Lido to collect a lifetime achievement award and to unveil the restored version of 1951's The Tales of Hoffmann, directed by Emeric Pressburger and her late husband Michael Powell. Inside the casino, the guests were plunged into the intoxicating, expressionistic microverse of Offenbach's old opera. The colours gleamed, the music crashed and Powell and Pressburger's antique treasure put most of its modern rivals to shame.
Best moment of deja vu Venice's opening film, Birdman, contained a bravura set piece in which Michael Keaton's unstable ageing actor accidentally locks himself outside the theatre and has to convince the ushers that he's actually needed on stage. Three days later, The Humbling opened with a scene in which an unstable ageing actor played by Al Pacino does the exact same thing. Spend too long at Venice and even the films start talking to each other.
Best stunt Lars von Trier has sworn off press conferences following his ill-judged joking at the 2011 Cannes film festival. But he was prepared to bend the rules for Venice, appearing on a laptop screen and having the actor Stellan Skarsgård feed him questions from the audience. Skarsgård had three lifelines and Von Trier was his "phone-a-friend". While this was typically playful behaviour from the controversial Danish director, one feared he had again misjudged his audience. Most of the reporters in the press room appeared utterly bewildered.
