A scene from The Fountain.

Guilt and introspection were the order of the day for many of the films that screened at the 63rd Venice Film Festival (August 31-September 9), on display in Spike Lee's fascinating and exemplary four-hour Hurricane Katrina documentary When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts, Oliver Stone's surprisingly restrained World Trade Center, Stephen Frears' excellent The Queen for which Helen Mirren picked up the best actress prize and Peter Morgan the screenplay award, Brian De Palma's stylish adaptation of James Elroy's The Black Dahlia and Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland, which won Ben Affleck the best actor award for his portrayal of TV's first Superman George Reeves.

There was remorse and soul-searching too in Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain which premiered here after a torturous production that was six years in the making. Originally set to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett before Pitt bailed and the project collapsed, forcing Aronofsky to rejigger both budget and script, bringing in new stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz (who turned up on the Lido looking rather amazing for someone who'd only given birth three months ago). The Fountain is a remarkably simple story of love and faith complicated by a narrative structure that takes place across three time periods — the 16^th, 21^st and 26th centuries — although only two are actually meant to be real, the third fiction.

In The Fountain's contemporary story Izzi (Weisz) is dying of a brain tumour and married to Jackman's Tommy Creo, a research scientist desperate to find a cure for cancer before it's too late. As Izzi finds her inner peace, her last wish is for Tommy to finish the final chapter of The Fountain, the book she's been writing which tells the story of a Spanish conquistador named Tomas (Jackman) who's seeking the secret of eternal life in the Mayan jungle for his Queen Isabella (Weisz). The futuristic third element features a shaven-headed Jackman look rather like David Carradine from TV's Kung Fu floating through the cosmos towards a distant nebula inside a see-through bubble spaceship accompanied by a tree that carries the life force of his dead wife which he hugs on occasion.

There's no denying the scope, humanity and imagination behind Aronofsky's wildly ambitious vision, which straddles that tricky line between the epic and the emotional and New Age nonsense. Jackman, however, handles his character's wide range of emotions with much skill and Weisz is her usual terrific self, but, nevertheless, the film sometimes teeters into Erich Von Daniken territory, occasionally becoming plain risible — not least the scene of Jackman's conquistador turning into a gardden of flowers after drinking from the tree of life.

Even more disappointing was David Lynch's Inland Empire, his first film since Mullholland Drive, which received its world premiere here, with Lynch also the youngest recipient of the festival's Lifetime Achievement Award. The plot, such as it is, tells of actress Nikki (Laura Dern) who joins the cast of a movie directed by Jeremy Irons' Kingsley and co-starring Justin Theroux's philandering Devon. As Nikki learns of the project's troubled history — it's a remake of a cursed movie whose leads both died — she and Devon seem to become their characters.