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French actress Catherine Deneuve arrives for the screening of "Potiche"

VENICE (AFP) - French cinema icons Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu came together again at the Venice film festival on Saturday as the oddest of couples in a farce with attitude: "Potiche".

Based on a play of the same name, the comedy relates the unlikely transformation of bourgeois housewife Suzanne Pujol (Deneuve) into company executive and her complex relationship with Babin, a dyed-in-the-wool unionist played by Depardieu, 61.

The title posed a special challenge to translators: they rendered it as "trophy wife" in English -- though the elegant Suzanne is a stay-at-home first wife -- and a sarcastic "my brilliant wife" in Italian.

In any case, Deneuve's character rejects the role and plunges headlong into running her ailing husband's umbrella factory and mollifying the workforce before going on to run for mayor -- against Babin.

"The situation for women has improved, but slowly" since 1977, when the action of "Potiche" takes place, Deneuve told reporters, noting that "men and women are still treated differently today, especially in terms of salary."

The 66-year-old French legend, though clearly at home in the role of Suzanne and a veteran of numerous other comedies, insisted she was not a comic actress.

"It's a genre I like very much which is very difficult," said Deneuve, radiant in a white suit.

Director Francois Ozon, 42, who first worked with Deneuve in "8 Women" the 2002 film that won him international acclaim, said he was surprised to have a comedy selected for the competition.

"In France, people love comedies, but they don't respect them," he said.

Ozon is among several young directors in a decidedly youthful line-up selected by festival chief Marco Mueller for this year's Mostra, which runs through September 11.

The world's oldest film festival kicked off on Wednesday with 41-year-old US director Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller "Black Swan", while Sofia Coppola, 39, unveiled her father-daughter drama "Somewhere", set in Hollywood, on Friday.

Still to come in the competition for the coveted Golden Lion here is "Promises Written on Water", about a girl with a terminal illness, by 49-year-old Vincent Gallo.

Also in the under-50 crowd is Quentin Tarantino, 47, who heads the jury.

Saturday featured another comedy, "La Passione" by Carlo Mazzacurati of Italy starring the prolific Silvio Orlando.

He plays a washed-up filmmaker forced to set his last-chance project in Tuscany after a plumbing disaster at his country home damages a 16th-century fresco in a neighbouring chapel.

As a bizarre form of compensation, the mayor asks him to lead Good Friday ceremonies -- so the story of the Passion becomes his film, starring a local actor who happens to be an egomaniac.

Mazzacurati said the film offered portraits of "creatures who because of their sensitivity are exposed more than others to life's difficulties."

He added: "Sometimes they make you laugh, but my tendency is to be moved by them."

"Ovsyanki" (Silent Souls) by Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko is the sombre story of a member of Russia's minority Merya culture who, accompanied by a friend and some caged birds, drives thousands of miles to bury his wife in a sacred lake.

"At first these characters seem simple and common, but in fact they harbour an internal richness that you can see only if you look closely," said Fedorchenko, who won a documentary award here in 2005 for "First on the Moon".

On Sunday, the Mostra, now its 67th edition, will present US director's Kelly Reichart's "Meek's Cutoff" about the American frontier culture; Hong Kong New Waver Tsui Hark's epic mystery film "Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame"; and "Post Mortem," set in Chile during the 1973 coup, by Pablo Larrain.

©AFP / Vincenzo Pinto

"We consider ourselves the 'couturiers' of glass," said Seguso

VENICE, Italy (AFP) - With a clientele that includes crowned heads, Archimede Seguso Vetreria, a stalwart of Murano's storied glassmakers, has no need to change its formula for success.

"We buck the trend. We work traditionally, everything by hand," said Gino Seguso, son of the late Archimede, the solid glass sculptor famed for his stylised animals, and generations of Segusos before him on the outlying Venetian island of Murano.

"We consider ourselves the 'couturiers' of glass," said Seguso, whose atelier collaborates with top international artists, designers and architects and caters for royalty, heads of state and the likes of Tiffany's, a loyal client for 60 years.

The guest book holds the compliments of Queen Sirikit of Thailand, King Juan Carlo and Queen Sofia of Spain and Italian President Giorgio Napolitano among other notables.

The glassmaker's enormous creations lend prestige to places like the lobby of the Veneto Bank headquarters or add extra opulence to the swank Hotel Metropole on Venice's Grand Canal near St Mark's Square.

That grandeur makes a stark contrast to the rustic Murano workshop, where a 100-year-old furnace was fired up.

©AFP / Vincenzo Pinto

Seguso's atelier collaborates with top international artists, designers and architects

Though dressed in an impeccable suit, Seguso lifted a plate off the furnace to reveal the blinding yellow heat inside, and used a long iron tool to pull out a glowing red lump of molten glass, waving it in a gentle circle as cooling strands of glass spiraled to the floor.

The workshop was set up in 1948, shortly after Archimede Seguso left the family firm to create his own brand.

He left an indelible mark on glassmaking, having started out as a teenager and worked until six months before his death in 1999 aged 90.

"In the 1920s my father was considered the maestro for animals," Gino Seguso told AFP, adding that he returned to the speciality in the late 1950s.

The older Seguso is also credited with developing the technique of embedding filigree inside his creations as well as for his lacework, a technique known as Merletto, the Italian word for lace.

In the showroom bursting with chandeliers, vases and objets d'art, as well as a glass menagerie of rabbits, ducks or fish and other figurines, Seguso, who himself joined the family business in 1959, ticks off the decades reflected in his father's rendition of the female form.

©AFP / Vincenzo Pinto

The older Seguso is credited with developing the technique of embedding filigree inside his creations

During Italy's pre-war fascist period, which harkened back to the Roman empire, the feminine figure was more classical, with a smaller head and fuller body, he said. Moving on to the 1970s, he held up another nude, this one tall and thin.

Seguso dreams of building a museum devoted to his father's work and has approached Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, for the project.

Today the atelier's 30 craftsmen -- all local except for one Sri Lankan and one Russian -- work at their own pace, producing no more than three or four objects a day.

Seguso's three daughters Emanuela, Francesca and Barbara are in charge of jewellery and accessories under the brand Segusissime, with clients including US First Lady Michelle Obama.

"The idea of making glass jewellery came to them in a flash when they were in their forties," said Seguso, in his early 70s.

While aware of the threat of copies mass-produced on "terra firma" -- meaning mainly China -- Seguso, whose pedigree as a glassmaker goes back to 1397, was untroubled.

"You can tell the difference. If they want to copy us, let them. We can always create something new and distinctive," he said.

Archimede Seguso Vetreria is a purveyor of "slow glass," Seguso joked. "We will stick to our tradition of creating by hand with a touch of fantasy."