At the Venice Film Festival, a lost accreditation pass is a terrible thing. On day six, I lost mine. Without one’s likeness slung around one’s neck on a ribbon, one is stopped at the barrier to the viewing areas, assumed to be a terrorist, a spy from the rival Rome Film Festival, or possibly another director trying to smuggle a 2½-hour film into an epic-intensive programme. “No, no, we are full. We cannot take any more long masterpieces. You have a short film? In that case, you can enter.”

A gracious press chief, extracting a promise to report my loss to the police (short of exciting crimes on the Lido) replaced my credentials and ensured I missed no movie. So I caught this year’s three mid-event marathons: I’m Not There (Bob Dylan’s life played by six different actors), Brad Pitt taking 150 photogenic minutes to be hunted and killed in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Abdellatif Khechiche’s The Grain and the Mullet.