This time next week I’ll be packing my bags for Venice, where the 80th edition of its annual film festival will unveil new films by Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Yorgos Lanthimos, David Fincher, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Bradley Cooper, the late William Friedkin – an especially glistening lineup for an event never short on gloss. But even without such attractions, Venice would remain my favourite festival: it’s the faintly unreal allure of the city itself, the spray from the Vaporetto as you leave the airport, the sense that you’re arriving into an eternal film location rather than just an industry event.
You can’t arrive on the Lido, the drowsy barrier island where the festival unfolds, and not recall the yearning melancholy and faded finery of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice – that the Grand Hotel des Bains, where Dirk Bogarde’s wilting composer Gustav von Aschenbach saw out his days, has been unoccupied since 2010 underlines the isle’s ghostly air of glamour. Although Visconti’s film is set in summer, you’d be forgiven for remembering otherwise. It’s Nicolas Roeg’s devasted, desolately wintry Don’t Look Now (ITVX), of course, that best captures Venice in its off-season. Its misty, depopulated maze of alleys and canals laden with threat match the mindset of Donald Sutherland’s grief-stricken parent.
