Nicolas Roeg was a superb cinematographer, who became one of cinema’s most influential directors. His first four films were some of the most innovative and unorthodox movies to have come out of the 1970’s new liberal cinema. Of those, it is his Psychological/Supernatural horror thriller, “Don’t Look Now”, that, for my money, is his best. The movie is a fascinating and horrifying depiction of the devastation caused by grief. They say that when someone you deeply love dies, a whole universe dies with them. When the lost loved one is a small innocent child, the universe not only dies but is destroyed. Roeg used a Daphne du Maurier short story as a basis for this premise.
The movie opens at the countryside home of a happy, well-to-do family. The home belongs to John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie). John is either a building engineer or architect who is working on pictures of an old building, which we find out later is an historical church in Venice, Italy, and on which he will later begin work to refurbish. At the country home it is raining, and the couple’s two children are playing outside. There is a small pond that quickly fills up, and their small daughter Christine falls victim to a terrible accident. The scene where John, who somehow senses what is happening just a little too late, discovers her body is one of the most heart-wrenching sad scenes I have ever seen. His cry of anguish fills the entire screen. From that point on, it is Christine’s death that drives the movie.
Months have passed, and the couple are living in a hotel in Venice, as John starts the work of refurbishing the church. Their son is sent off to a boarding school while they work and live in Italy. Here they meet two elderly sisters, one who is blind and clairvoyant. The clairvoyant sister tells Laura that first she sees the spirit of Christine happily wondering beside the couple, then that John is also, unbeknownst to him, a clairvoyant, and finally that John is in grave danger if he stays in Venice. In addition, there is a serial killer running wild in the city while the couple are there.
The Venice shown in this movie is not your typical tourist brochure. It is late August or Early Winter, and the small alleys and canals are all greyish and foreboding. There is a sinister fog that drifts through the city and rats permeate the water. The atmosphere of the Venice portrayed by Roeg gives a European gothic feel to the movie. While Venice is usually full of tourists and crowded, this off-season depiction includes many dark, silent passageways with many empty alleyways that are perfect for hiding evil intent.
Always the Cinematographer, Roeg uses this background to emphasize the occult mystery in the story by dressing the dead girl in a bright red raincoat on the day she drowned. John keeps seeing this bright red image within the city, and since we believe he has the extrasensory gift, he and us the viewer believe he is seeing his dead daughter’s ghost. The contrast of the deep red with the dark grey of the city is striking. Steven Spielberg copied this effect in his Holocaust masterpiece, “Schindler’s List”, when he used the color red to emphasize the terrible fate of a little girl.
“Don’t Look Now” is a movie that has influenced not only Spielberg. Its look, feel and play with colors helped in developing the existing Italian Gialo genre into its next level. The late 70s movies of Dario Argento owe quite a lot to this movie.
It is not possible to talk about “Don’t Look Now”, without mentioning the controversial love or sex scene between John and Laura. It happens the night after Laura is told by the blind clairvoyant that Christine is wondering beside them as a spirit and is happy. This gives Laura a short-lived reprieve from her deep pain and allows her to make love to John. The scene is quite explicit for a non-pornographic movie, but what makes it so special is the way Roeg edits the love making together with the scenes of the couple getting dressed for dinner later. Like many aspects of the movie, these scenes are not edited together chronologically, but together, give a very loving and warm effect to the act of making love. The fact that this is probably the first time the couple made love since the death of their daughter, is emphasized with the subtle, beautiful way Roeg films their passion crisscrossed with the scenes of normalcy while getting dressed for dinner.
Roeg’s method of quick edits through different levels of time is displayed throughout the movie. Not only in the love-making scene, but many other scenes as well. The opening scene of Christine’s death, for example, splits the screen back in forth between the couple in the house, the children playing, and the girls discovering death. Roeg here hints at John’s ability to sense things as he runs to save his girl, even before there is any hint that something happened. He is, of course, as he is throughout the movie too late.
“Don’t Look Now” is quite a movie with its insight into the horror of parental grief and its hint of the occult and even the horror of Catholic terror which can rise up in our subconscious when bad things happen. The movie has a satisfactory although shocking payoff which kept me thinking about what had just happened long after the closing credits ended. It is a horror masterpiece of extraordinary depth.
1001 Movies before you die 