When you step off the plane and the first faces you encounter — not yet out of the baggage claim, even — are those of a friendly, familiar PR team who immediately furnish you with a press release, it’s fair to say that you’re very much at a film festival, even if Venice hasn’t yet officially drawn the curtains on this year’s edition.
At the moment, things are still at the assembly stage: I’m currently sitting in the wi-fi lounge of the festival center — a cavernous space of 30-foot ceilings, gold-mosaic marble walls and rippling red curtains that is surely the most incongruously grandiose room ever set aside for the Great Unshaven of film journalism — watching garrulous workmen argue about the placement of couches, while others disentangle the wires sprouting from a teetering tower of AV equipment.
Tomorrow, by the time I roll into the first 9 a.m. screening of “Black Swan” — caffeine-wired and perhaps still pajama-clad — you’d never know they’d been there.