All across the Lido, you could see it on the stars’ faces: sheer joy.

Whether it was Timothée Chalamet’s beaming face greeting fans, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain’s playfulness for the cameras, Josh Brolin’s ear-to-ear grin in the front row of a “Dune” event or those looks exchanged between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, the 78th Venice International Film Festival mixed elegance and fun in a way rarely seen since early 2020.