Gluttony of the Beautiful Kingdom – Travel Notes from Venice Film Festival

Hair matted together from humidity and grease, eyes heavy with bags and a few vodkas sloshing around in the stomach marked the end of another day at the festival. Sleeping through The Eternal Daughter was not on the bingo card for today, but neither was necking five vodkas beforehand. The beauty of the Italian sun. The hatred of having to be here. The love for this new country. I have flown out and lived in luxury for a fortnight while watching movies at Venice Film Festival. Do I want that? Do I need it?

Considering I was at the festival to write, it is ironic just how little time there actually is for it. 6am starts, 2am finishes. Barely a real, solid meal between screenings of features that I could have waited to watch at home two months later, or, for many of these films, not at all. But it was the experience I was there for. The late nights with new friends. The mosquitos. The food. The mosquitos. All of it equated to a beautiful fortnight in Italy, working and toiling away as only I can. Far too much, on the cusp of burnout and reliant on alcohol once again. It was a beautiful hellscape.

I have now covered an internationally acclaimed film festival and visited a beautiful country in the process. I have interviewed people I admire and reviewed their work with no desire to be pally with them afterwards. I have covered Glastonbury and Rotterdam Film Festival, albeit from home. I have had front page splashes, exclusively weird news, and rewarding local stories flutter through. All of this in just over a year. Little bouts of clout and praise, the verification on Twitter, the knowledge that my byline is everywhere. It all means a lot. I feel nothing for it. It means a lot from the perspective of a functioning journalist working on the dream, but it is empty, vacuous and a bit of a sham.

Do I love the work itself or the act of working? Probably both, maybe neither. So much time was spent in Venice admiring the task of working and not acting on the work itself. Hours spent in the press room, sitting around making myself look busy when actually I had struggled to take myself out of bed and brave the heat for yet another day of lugging around a bag filled with notes and thoughts on films nobody particularly wanted to read about. Analytics don’t lie. Just The Whale making the biggest splash. It was there that Venice took hold of the mind, for good or ill.

When taking seats at screenings, the best places tend to be right at the end of the row. There is nothing worse than being trapped in the middle of a screening, desperately seeking a way out between rows of people you cannot communicate with. Language is a strange beast. Viewers old and young came to the first screening of Brendan Fraser’s return to leading work, The Whale. It was to be a delightful tribute to a deserving return to the big screen. Not quite the end of the row for this seat, but just one off. An elderly man on one side and a stunning woman on the other side. Sandwiched between death and lust to watch a 600-pound man masturbate and drink Pepsi.

Somehow, this depiction left me sobbing. Whether it was the film itself or the culmination of such stress and fear from recent events is unknowable. All I do know is that there are few prettier sights than a 22-year-old journalist sobbing into a crisp, new MacBook Air on the steps of a Lido-based film festival with a Campari spritz in one hand and a laptop balanced in the other. That is the work we strive for, is it not? Whatever it was, the feelings it brings about and the unreachable desires it causes are like a knife in the brain. As excruciatingly difficult as it is to verbalise the need for success and the almost comical hatred for it, there is a fine line that needs to be balanced. I have either succeeded or failed. Knowing which one is far harder than it seems.

Failure, in the sense that I should have done more while I was there. 2am finishes and boat rides back to Venice do take it out of you, though. Lugging around a 23kg suitcase when you have to switch out your city apartment for a street-set villa in oven-ready heat is not a desirable place to be. Neither is Lido, to be fair. It is riddled with blood-sucking people and rude insects. Venice is a beautiful place. Truly. That does not need to be reiterated any further. Their food is divine, their people are a mixture of seasoned and ignorant, while their culture relies on a back and forth between coffee and cooperation. That is not unique to Venice, but it has been refined here for hundreds of years.

What is not beautiful is the mental fatigue a festival provides. Sleepless nights are the leading cause, followed closely by the heat and feeling like you’re on the cusp of a breakdown. Nearly being trampled to death by Harry Styles fans and elderly people hoping to queue jump you for the last piece of wasp-filled brioche is not a holiday. It is hell. It was as hot as the Devil’s playground anyway. No amount of poor-quality coffee and Coca Cola can keep you going at a time like that. It is physically draining as well as mentally excruciating. Would I do it again? I’ve no idea. Days turned into weeks turned into a blurred line of being awake but not aware. It was likely some of the scariest moments of my life, from nearly being yelled at by Abel Ferrara to continually seeing Steve Buscemi roaming the same streets and bars as me, like some phantom haunt of Monsters Inc. past.

Next time, maybe I’ll bring an umbrella for the heat and some Class-A drugs to keep me going through the four hours of sleep, the horrible weather and the constant, eating desire to bin the whole festival off and go for a pint. That’s what I did for the last four days, and if I went next year, there is a good chance I would file not one single piece of work. I’d be too busy exploring the cool taste of on-tap Heineken. The refreshing, heavy pours of vodka. Temptation for freedom from work, which I love and hate, in the face of the burning, shallow soul.

Some would count me lucky for having the privilege to cover such a big event. But it is not luck, and it is not a privilege either. This is my job. I have worked hard to reach that point. There is nothing lucky about professional pursuit in the face of sacrificing a social life. A pint here or coffee there is about as much as can be mustered. If the balance is tipped the other way, no work gets done. The career stalls. I’m either a husk for work or a vibrant, social parasite. Either or. Venice highlighted that for me. A few people did too. It is not a privilege either. This is not a right for the individual but a rite of passage for the career I have chosen. I was there. Thousands of people were. As much as I like to express the idea that I am special, I am clearly not, when thousands can do exactly what I’m doing, but with a better balance between living and working. Are the two the same? They shouldn’t be.