DON’T LOOK NOW

DON’T LOOK NOWRating: ½
UK/Italy. 1973.Director - Nicolas Roeg, Screenplay - Chris Bryant & Alan Scott, Based on the Short Story by Daphne du Maurier, Producer - Peter Katz, Photography - Anthony Richmond, Music - Pino Donaggio, Art Direction - Giovanni Soccal. Production Company - Casey/Eldorado.Cast:Donald Sutherland (John Baxter), Julie Christie (Laura Baxter), Hilary Mason (Heather), Clelia Matania (Wendy), Massimo Serato (Bishop Alberto Barbarrigo), Renato Scarpo (Inspector Longhi)

Plot: Architect John Baxter is moments too late to save his daughter Christine as she accidentally drowns in a stream on his English country estate. Afterwards he takes up a restoration job on a cathedral in Venice so that he and his wife Laura can get over their grief. But there he is haunted by strange visions and in the streets sees an elusive child in a red coat which he thinks may be Christine. Laura meets two sisters, one of whom is a psychic and talks of seeing Christine. Laura returns to England but John is certain that he sees her and the sisters travelling in a barge on the canals. Finally he pursues the child, cornering it, but it proves instead to be a dwarf serial killer who has been terrorizing the city, and stabs him. As he lies dying his visions prove to have been of his own death.

During the 1970s and for the better part of the 1980s, before tapering off in the 1990s, Nicolas Roeg emerged as one of the most fascinating, if flawed, directors in both arthouse and genre cinema. Roeg began as a cinematographer for people like Roger Corman and Francois Truffaut, adding the distinctive colour schemes to works such as The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Roeg then debuted as a director with the cult classic Performance, starring Mick jagger (1970). Roeg went solo with the culture clash drama Walkabout (1970), about two English schoolchildren lost in the Australian Outback. He has since made films such as The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie(1976), Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980), Eureka (1982), Insignificance (1985), Castaway (1987) and Track 29 (1988), among others.

Thematically Roeg’s films fall between visual and editing schemes conducted with a daring that few other directors go out on, and between considerable pretensions and even outright boredom. His work is characterized by elliptical non-linear editing and the use of random chiaroscuros of pictures edited into the narrative, a frequent fascination with sexual obsessions and a recurring portrait of cultural alienation. Sadly Roeg’s work in the 1990s has tapered off into a series of efforts that have only received minimal releases and the likes of the Samson and Delilah tv movie (1996) and episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which seem only a shadow of his earlier work.

Roeg loves to design films as intellectual puzzles, and this tapestry of precognisance and predestination is he at his most scintillating. It is the centrepiece of Roeg’s cult and is frequently regarded as his greatest film. The film is a game of elliptical, enigmatic visual clues which map over onto themselves in a densely laden visual weave. The opening where the daughter accidentally drowns is conducted in a particularly masterful series of synchronous intercuts - working at home in his country estate Donald Sutherland ‘feels’ a child’s bicycle running over and breaking a piece of glass; the splash of a ball in a puddle cuts to Sutherland accidentally spilling a glass in his study; a red globule of the alcohol spilt across the slide Sutherland is viewing cuts to the drowning Christine’s red raincoat; the slow-motion bubbles and splashes of Sutherland’s rescue attempts map onto a whorl-shaped staircase on the slide. There are visual clues littered throughout the scene of things that will later feature in the film - Sutherland’s frenzied attempts to revive the body come to resemble the sexual contortions he and Christie will engage in later; the church in the slide is the one he will visit in the film; in the slide one can also see seated the figure of the dwarf who will be mistaken for Christine; while the red colour of the spilt alcohol will turn up as a teasing clue throughout the rest of the film as everything from the coats of the daughter and dwarf to finally the spill of the dying Sutherland’s own blood. Even the whorl shape will later become the pattern of tiles in the church restoration that Sutherland will examine. And right throughout the sequence Julie Christie sits with symbolic import reading a book entitled Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space, something which could equally serve as the title for an essay on the film.

The entire film is a game of these enigmatic clues. They lurk in every corner of the film - the red-coated figure that may or may not be Christine runs peripherally through the camera frame; as Sutherland and Christie dine in a cafe a seemingly supernatural wind blows open the doors just as a barge passes, the same barge that Sutherland later thinks he sees Christie on; a blind woman mutters otherworldly portents, her face is momentarily seen sinisterly laughing in a corona of light seconds before Sutherland’s near fatal fall from a scaffold; dead bodies left by the killer are dragged from the Venetian canals and momentarily cut to Christine’s body in the stream. In one visually dazzling scene Sutherland pursues the red-coated figure and the chase becomes a beautifully intricate mapping of purely visual clues, taunting the audience as much as Sutherland with the flickers of bright red amid the gloomy grey arched streets and lapping water - the red-coated figure momentarily seen passing through archways or reflected in the water of the canal, a square of red on Sutherland’s multi-hued scarf, a red sweater hanging on a clothesline across a canal.

Few films dare play such games for pure artistic dazzle. Indeed it is quite a surprise to learn that the film comes based on a short story by Daphne (Rebecca) du Maurier as it is quite difficult to imagine a written equivalent of the film.

Roeg crafts a picture of Venice like no other director quite before him. The location of the film is almost as though it were a character present in the drama. The tourist aspect of Venice is set aside for a vision of the city so old that buildings seem to be rotting, the stone tarnished and it a world of perpetual shadows. All the doom-laden ambience is beautifully summed up in one haunting moment of dialogue - “It’s like a city in aspic, left over from a dinner party where all the guests are dead and gone.” Indeed Venice is almost made to literally seem operate on a geometry that is ‘beyond space’ - its narrow twists of road seem to map back onto each other and take people back where they came from.

The influence of Don’t Look Now has been considerable. Although few films have sought to directly imitate it, its’ influence can be felt everywhere from Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic (1977) to Peter Weir’s haunting The Last Wave (1977), the Peter Straub adaptation Full Circle/The Haunting of Julia (1977), the obscure but fascinating The Appointment (1982), Paul Verhoeven’s tongue-in-cheek The Fourth Man (1983), the New Zealand-made Heaven (1998), the supposedly true-life based The Mothman Prophecies (2002) and The Ring (2002). A number of other films such as Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976) and Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers (1990) draw upon Roeg’s vision of an oppressively doom-laden Venice.

Nicolas Roeg’s other genre films are:- the sf film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) about an alienated alien visitor, , the surrealist Track 29 (1988), the wonderfully grotesque Roald Dahl children’s adaptation The Witches (1990) and the supernatural thriller Cold Heaven (1991). Roeg was also originally assigned to direct the Flash Gordon remake (1980).


1 9 7 3 (UK)

If ever there was a movie to describe as atmospheric, this is the one. The classical art of Venice, the seepy mystery of the canals, funereal imagery and a general sense of dread propel this puppy to its amazing climax. a very real, very hypnotic horror film that ranks as one of the most haunting efforts in the genre.
Don't Look Now (1973)


John and Laura Baxter are living in Venice when they meet a pair of elderly sisters, one of whom claims to be psychic. She insists that she sees the spirit of the Baxters' daughter, who recently drowned. Laura is intrigued, but John resists the idea. He, however, seems to have his own psychic flashes, seeing their daughter walk the streets in her red cloak, as well as Laura and the sisters on a funeral gondola.

Beautifully directed by Nicholas Roeg, this story of a husband (Sutherland) and wife (Christie) coming to terms with the death of their daughter gets subtly more and more disturbing as they meet up with a pair of elderly sisters who claim to have seen their daughter's spirit. Cue Donald Sutherland stumbling through out-of-season Venice amid the backdrop of a series of brutal murders . . .

Roeg must have ruined a thousand package holidays, painting Venice as a place of Gothic dread, full of dark alleys, unseen murderers and sinister psychics..

Famous now for the teasing shots of the little girl in a red coat, as well as one of the most memorable (and tasteful) sex scenes in cinema - The fact that Sutherland and Christie attracted more publicity for removing their pants than for scaring ours off should not overshadow this unsettling study of grief and premonition (but ok . . . it does look like they're actually doing it!).

The finale comes as both a total shock and an inevitable outcome (but watch it at night, on your own, and it becomes unbelievably frightening!). It leaves you stunned and you don't even realize how insane it is until a few days later when you find yourself wondering "what the hell was that?".

This is undoubtedly one of the finest British horror movies of all time, and a genuine masterpiece.

Don't Look Now

The hooded figure

With its shocking conclusion, Nicolas Roeg's beautifully filmed psychodrama managed a rare coup in modern cinema in that its outcome is both illogical and inevitable.

Architectural restorer John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) are taking a holiday in Venice to recover from the traumatic death of their young daughter, who drowned in the family fishpond. They meet a pair of sisters, one with psychic powers, and Laura becomes obsessed with the idea that their child will one day return to them. John is sceptical, but a string of coincidences and telepathic flashes suggest otherwise. Finally, he spots a familiar hooded figure - wearing a red plastic mac, like the one his girl died in - darting in and out of the city's walkways. Confronting the apparition, John comes face to face with a hideous, homicidal midget, who stabs him with a kitchen knife, making ominous sense of the weird sisters' prophesy.

As in many of Roeg's other films, present, past and future come together in kaleidoscopic editing. "