Directed by Nicolas Roeg — Screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant.
Whenever you watch a film two times in a row, you know it has its hooks in you. Don’t Look Now — Nicolas Roeg’s iconic, impressionistic, and occasionally scary psychological thriller based on a Daphne du Maurier short story of the same name — follows John and Laura Baxter (played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie respectively) not long after they have recently lost their daughter to an accident by their country home in England. They now find themselves in Venice, Italy, where John has been hired to help restore an ancient church. In the meantime, Laura befriends two elderly sisters, one of whom, Heather (played by Hilary Mason), claims to be clairvoyant and able to see their deceased daughter sitting between them in a restaurant. John, however, is skeptical of clairvoyance, and yet, from time to time in Venice, he sees a small figure wearing a similar red raincoat to that his daughter wore on the day that she died.
This classic has been on my watchlist for quite some time, and it fully lived up to my expectations. First off, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are really good in this film. I thought the film did an excellent job of establishing how their characters handled their grief in different (but always understandable) ways, with him jumping head first into his work about fixing what is broken and her eventual openness to inspect her grief to establish a lost connection. Their famous/infamous sex scene is really intimate, and I thought the way it was put together was really powerful with the music, at least to me, helping to highlight a desire for a loving connection and a respite in times when such a connection was difficult to otherwise establish, as well as the cuts to and from them getting dressed (separately until they reconvene by the door) indicating how time and reality will force you to move on and bring even its harshest realities back to the forefront thus severing the momentary reconnection as merely a happy but distant recollection already. This loving respite and connection is tender, intimate, and sweet, but a fleeting glimmer of who they were.
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is puzzling in the best way possible. Its use of color (especially that deep red), inventive match cuts, water, reflections, the breaking of glass, and so on is so well planned out and put together that, at least to me, the film always kept pulling me in. The fragmented, labyrinthine structure was clearly very influential, and the expert filmmaking dazzled me to no end. Pino Donaggio’s often quite delicate and soft score is extremely effective. It is the kind of film that I can understand not working for everyone, but it’s also one where even the bits and pieces that didn’t fully hit for me (the memorable ‘reveal’ didn’t fully click, even though what it signifies did) never stopped me from being extremely impressed by the skillful and steady hands that led the way. Its use of, and depiction of, a labyrinthine Venice as this haunted place where they’re surrounded by death, dilapidated buildings, smoke, shadows, powerful reds, and suffocating water is really intelligently done, as Roeg and his crew establish an instantly iconic atmosphere.
9 out of 10
– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
I'm Jeffrey Rex 