Time Out’s film editor, Mark Smith, is on assignment at the Venice Film Festival. He will be writing about the experience for the Time Out blog. Check back for regular updates, film news and first reviews.

Any old transit from Venice’s Marco Polo airport, particularly when you hail from the parched sands of the UAE in August, is liable to give the passenger the impression of having embarked upon a new life altogether.

Cool wind through barnet, salt on skin, the obligatory seagull on a buoy - are they stuffed, one wonders, or just stunned by the easy beauty of everything?.

Aboard Emirates airline’s bespoke water limousine, the effect is particularly profound.  Journeying toward the Lido at speed, I channelled Dirk Bogarde in the Lucino Visconti adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella; except, where Gustav von Aschenbach finds but one beguiling youth and, alas, Death In Venice, I discovered simply youth - my own.

Turns out a young person’s travel card is available, in these parts, to anyone under the grand old age of 29. Hardly surprising, in a city where grannies have been rocking this season’s acid bright Wayfarer sunglasses for some 20 years.

No such luck for Tomas, the ageing protagonist of Nowhere Man, the depressodrama which opened the festival for early arrivers. Trapped in a decent marriage of which he feels entirely unworthy, Tomas spies an escape route and takes it: on the premise of rescuing a dog from the inferno ingulfing his neighbour’s identikit home, he fakes his death and journeys to a tropical island under a stranger’s passport.

The island is, presumably, African, but the Greek strains of ‘Shirley Valentine’ escape fantasy accompany his departure. Where Tomas seeks reinvention he finds only degeneracy - economic, environmental and emotional - and there is bleak humour indeed when his one shot at redemption - rescuing a maimed beachside horse - ends in the mutilation of the hand attempting to feed.

Devoid of waffle, this Belgian production is a masterful, if punishing, revelation. Tomas spends the second half of the film with his injured hand encased in a sinister golfing glove.

Which got me to thinking- since when did a single celluloid glove come to denote danger? Is Kubrick to blame (A Clockwork Orange)? Or maybe Haneke (Funny Games)? On second thoughts, maybe it was ‘Moonwalker’?

Just goes to show, the pursuit of youth, beyond a certain age, often ends in tears…