Nicolas Roeg (1973)
When it was released in 1973, The Sun proclaimed that it featured the-act-of-love-as-it-has-never-been-filmed-before, or words to that effect (except they should all be in capital letters). That’s what sent my friend Ian to the cinema to see Don’t Look Now and it maybe explains why I struggled to take it seriously at the time – even though it was lavishly praised by more serious critics than The Sun’s. Nicolas Roeg’s reworking of a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, with a screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, is now accepted as a horror classic. It’s soon clear that Roeg’s priority is to create images that are elaborate, startling and brilliantly cut (the cinematographer was Anthony B Richmond, the editor Graeme Clifford). He undoubtedly succeeds in doing this but the eeriness is incontinent, laid on the narrative rather than connected with the characters. As a result, I don’t find Don’t Look Now scary. At the start of the film, John and Laura Baxter’s young daughter, Christine, drowns in a pond in the grounds of their home in England. The child is wearing a red plastic mac when the accident occurs and the garment sets the primary colour scheme of much of what follows in Venice, where John (Donald Sutherland), who works in church restoration, has accepted a commission. Roeg’s depiction of the city in winter – a Venice which seems not so much etiolated as rotting, a beautiful corpse – is one of the two memorable elements of the film. Laura (Julie Christie) meets in Venice a pair of sixtyish sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania), one of whom (Mason) is blind but claims to have second sight and to be able to see the deceased Christine. It’s after the suddenly hopeful Laura tells her sceptical husband about this meeting that the-act-of-love-as-it-had-never-been-filmed-before occurs, and this is the movie’s other memorable element. The sexual coverage looks remarkably extensive even now, in spite of Roeg’s repeatedly intercutting it with the couple dressing for dinner afterwards and Pino Donaggio’s twinkly musical accompaniment.
By now, the beautifully fractured images and rhythm are dominating the story that Roeg is telling. The imbalance between the two becomes increasingly pronounced as Don’t Look Now goes on. It’s beyond me why the film is admired as a penetrating study of the psychology of grief at the death of a child. It seems more and more a piece of design: when John Baxter finally catches up with the tiny, fugitive figure in red that he has kept glimpsing at Venice street corners and is stabbed by what turns out to be not his daughter but a grinning, homicidal crone-dwarf (Adelina Poerio), what you mainly notice is that the blood pouring from his neck looks more like raspberry mousse. Does John meet this grim end because he has denied his own second sight? Who knows or cares? Surely not Nicolas Roeg, and Donald Sutherland is rather dull as John anyway. Julie Christie’s sheer beauty never fails to take you by surprise; here she looks especially great wearing a pair of knee length boots (red, of course) and, when she’s expected to create a mood through her face and body, she’s expressive. As usual, though, her line readings are not. There’s a moment in Don’t Look Now when Laura reminds John that it was he who insisted their children (the Baxters have a son too) should play just where they wanted to at home; Christie’s voice is so bland that Laura seems not at all upset, let alone accusatory. Yet this blandness – like the toneless (post-recorded?) sound of the voices in the film more generally – contributes to the remote, disorienting atmosphere. For many people, not being able to get a purchase on Don’t Look Now probably makes it more spooky There is one, presumably unintentional laugh, when John Baxter throws up and says, ‘I haven’t been sick for ten years’. Donald Sutherland makes it sound as if a decade of vomit has been building up in him. Reading Pauline Kael’s review afterwards made it worth watching Don’t Look Now again after an interval of nearly forty years but I think I’ll leave a similar gap before I return for a third helping.
2 March 2013
