Venice has a reputation as the easy A-list festival – the one that comes as a gentle package of calm and Campari by contrast with the agitation of Cannes. Well, the calm may yet settle upon us, but it’ll take a day or two for the stress to wear off. During the lockdown years, Venice managed to subsist in very sturdy form by introducing a ticketing system partly designed to maintain social distancing and it pretty much worked fine. Last Sunday morning, though, a new online ticket system raised public and press hackles by putting delegates through a baffling e-labyrinth of queues and dead ends for more than five hours. Once people actually arrived in the city, greeted by a Wednesday morning downpour, followed by a blast of blistering sun, we all felt we’d been put through a special circle of Dante’s hell reserved for jaded cinephiles.
