Mostra with a hole at its heart

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The eighth wonder of the world is Italian building time. Construction schedules expand like the universe. Years pass; hope defiantly endures; occasionally a new stone or brick is added. Take the new Venice Film Festival palace. Once planned for this year's event, it was rescheduled for 2011. Now - after the discovery of an asbestos burial site - it will be 2012. Any bets on 2013?

At least the project has started. The entire festival now skirts a hole the size of the Roman Forum. One or two people have fallen in (it is said) and had to be hauled back up with ropes and pack animals. On bad movie days depressed filmgoers are said to have dug escape tunnels - until the lagoon water, rushing in, lifts them up and swirls them back into the cinema showing Julian Schnabel's Miral or Sofia Coppola's Somewhere.

These have been the worst movies so far. The first is a truth-based mega-soap about Israel/Palestine, complete with bombastic dialogue and bimbo casting. The second is Coppola figlia's attempt to repeat Lost in Translation with another wry tale of empty time in a hotel. But with Stephen Dorff (marooned movie star) and Elle Fanning (estranged teenage daughter) replacing Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, the first film's charm is lost in translation.

On happier days we forget the hole completely. The Mostra del Cinema delivers the goods, as it nearly always does, and we experience a movie such as Japan's Norwegian Wood or Russia's Silent Souls.

The second is my early tip for the Golden Lion. Like Russia's most recent Lion winner, The Return, it is a mystery journey replete with silence, sense-of-place and a secret that unfolds like a dark flower. Sceptical colleagues suspected there might be a wind-up in director Alexei Fedorchenko's depiction of a remote Finno-Russian community where widowed spouses burn their dead on pyres after decorating their pudenda and observing a tradition, called "smoking", of candid reminiscence to friends. "All three of her holes were working and I unsealed them," says the bereaved factory boss to the assistant he takes on the trip to the burning beach, and before that enlists in ribbon-dressing his wife's pubic hair.

The community does exist, apparently: a small corner of Russia that will soon be in Wikipedia, if not there already. What matters is the spell Fedorchenko casts on screen. Grim skies, endless roads, crumbling industry; the sense of a jigsaw existence - epic, long-established - to which even the surreal pontoon bridges belong, their sections bobbing on rusty drums, or the photo-collage landscapes compiled by the assistant, an amateur geographer/ethnologist. Lives stretch so far into infinity, here, it is no wonder the people believe an "afterlife" exists that can be mapped somewhere on Earth.

Norwegian Wood calls to memory another Golden Lion victory. Vietnam's Tran Anh Hung won the Venice prize with Cyclo (1995), soon after becoming a precocious arthouse wow with The Scent of Green Papaya. Now he has won the lottery to film Haruki Murakami's international bestseller about love, suicide and the afterglow of a Beatles song. Faithful to the Japanese novel, Tran preserves the triangular romance - hero-narrator and two girls, one clinically depressive, the other life-loving but unpredictable - and finds scenic correlatives for Murakami's moody-mercurial prose. The wind-rustled grasslands, the skies roiling with cloud, and the mountainscapes speared with rain are wonderfully expressive. So is Kiko Mizuhara's performance as Midori (the kooky girl), an actress with the same teasing incandescence and instant star quality shown by the young Julie Christie in her Billy Liar debut.

We didn't expect a haunting, fine-wrought film like this in 2010. Mostra director Marco Mueller had told us this year's festival would be "different". Hence - presumably - the triple bill of slam-bang thrillers on opening night. Darren Aronofsky once made the brain-testing Pi, but you wouldn't know it from Black Swan, the evening's first and main attraction, a blood-bolstered ballet thriller starring Natalie Portman as a Faust-ish danseuse who suspects people of going Mephistophelean on her ass (as this year's jury president Quentin Tarantino might put it). Aronofsky won the Golden Lion two years ago with another no-brainer, The Wrestler. So perhaps he knows what he is doing.

Action speaks louder than artiness. That must be the message, too, with this year's career-achievement Golden Lion, awarded to John Woo. The mayhem merchant of Hard-Boiled and Face/Off brought Reign of Assassins to Venice, a film of stupendous battiness, exploding in all directions like a booby-trapped fortune cookie.

We carry on hoping. Philistinism does what it can, while art tries to find a way through. Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem from Chile is a lugubrious charmer, set in Santiago during the Allende-toppling coup in 1973. The maker of Tony Manero doesn't quite match that saturnine comedy of mortality, but he has the same star, the lank-haired, corpse-pale Alfredo Castro, here appropriately playing a mortuary worker.

Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff flickers and teases, a western about three lost families driving their wagon train across the Oregon desert, who have to trust their survival to a sworn enemy, a captured Indian. The redeemability of those we institutionalise as foes: that was the theme, too, of Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing. But something odd must have happened in editing. As the captured Afghan jihadist (Vincent Gallo with a beard) escapes across snowy Poland, during transport to a presumed CIA torture centre, holes keep opening in the story's logic. How did he get that second pair of boots, after the first is lost in an animal-trap? Are we expected to buy the abrupt dea ex machina denouement, resembling a leftover from a bad PoW escape movie? (There is always a good-hearted peasantwoman when you need one...)

Five days of the festival remain and Venice needs them. Two Golden Lion contenders - from Russia and Vietnam/Japan - are not much to show for half a festival. That hole in the middle of the Lido is starting to look symbolic. But as we said, the Venice Film Festival has a long, honourable tradition of getting out of holes when it needs to.

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