Don't Look Now (1973)

 

“Channel 4s 100 Scariest Moments” #20

 

 

Don't Look Now

(1973)

 

For a short period of time, Cinematographer turned Director Nicholas Roeg pulled off something remarkable, he was able to make art-house films into major financial successes in conventional cinemas.

 

Very likely this was a result of him hitting the scene at a perfect moment to tap in to a short-lived audience craving to be challenged, and he was blessed with three big hits, “Performance” (1970), “Walkabout” (1971), and this film.

 

Unfortunately, this sliver-of-time was short lived. By 1981, the Playwright Character in “My Dinner with Andre” was complaining that the audiences weren’t the same quality as they had been a decade before.

 

Roeg’s fourth directorial effort, the compelling and groundbreaking SF, “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976), just barely recouped its budget, though it achieved an Art-House Cult-status later. (A convincing argument can be made that distribution was as at much at fault as changing audience tastes: “Performance” faced opposition from its distributor Warner Brothers but ultimately out-performed expectations. “The Man Who…” which I’d think would’ve been an easier sell, faced worse, Paramount flatly refused to distribute it, leading the filmmakers to sell the rights cheaply to low-rent and unprepared Cinema V.)

 

“Don’t Look Now,” is a Ghost Story but defies all conventions o its genre, but this film looking it in the face defies most conventions of its Genre by admitting something Horror films almost never do, and then makes that central, it makes Grief its subject matter.

 

Grief is a plot-point in most Horror, buttressing Revenge Fantasies and Ghost Stories, providing the primary motivation for at least half the obsessed Mad Scientists and lonely-in-their-immortality Vampires out there, but how often does Horror film actually take on the difficult task of examining it? As I write this, I can only think of three other examples the do it successfully, “Lake Mungo” (2008), “Ghosts from the Machine” (2010), and “The Babadook” (2014).

 

Roeg addressed the difficulty of the subject matter in an interview, “Well, it's a strange idea to make grief into the sole thrust of the film. Grief can separate people. I've seen it happen. Even the closest, healthiest relationship can come undone through grief. People split up. Or there is a distancing. They can't help it. The fact is that grief doesn't comfort grief. It's just one of those hard facts.”

 

This film is based by a novel by Daphne Du Maurier, and author whose work was the basis of films by many of the masters of suspense, notably Alfred Hitchcock. It is about the impact of the death of a child on a marriage. It’s a good marriage, but the loss maybe too terrible a burden for the couple to bear. Woven into this is the capriciousness of fate in a larger sense, and that none of the philosophical and emotional defenses we build up against that capriciousness can ever be adequate.

 

The film opens with John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) studying slides of Venetian Churches while his two children, John Jr. (Nicolas Salter) and Christine (Sharon Williams) play outside their home near a pond. John is suddenly overcome by a feeling he can’t describe, and runs out to his children, but it’s too late. Christine has drowned.

 

It is a scary scene, its suspense leaning heavily on the death of a child and the emergence of the uncanny, both are radical violations of the normality of the character’s lives -- things too large for an average, decent man and woman to cope with. It also introduces the film’s major visual symbols, a bright-red parka, water, breaking glass, and even the weather (when the story resumes, in a different country and an indeterminate time later, but we know that at least a year has passed because these characters are walking beneath similar steely and oppressive late-Autumn skies).

 

Christine’s death drives the characters’ desperate needs and shapes the rest of the plot, but just as important is that we have learned John has some PSI powers, even though he will spend the rest of the film denying that, even to himself.

 

This first scene ends with cries of pain from first John, and then, when his wife Laura (Julie Christie). sees the tragedy, she utters an even a louder scream. Then there’s a jump cut to a drill loudly digging away at old stone. This was, according to Roeg, a homage to Hitchcock's “The 39 Steps” (1935), where a cleaning woman sees a corpse and screams, and this jumps to locomotive emerging from a tunnel.

 

The stone is part of a 16th-century Venetian Church being restored by John. The city is at the end of the tourist season, and Roeg avoids most of the famous sights and presents it as mostly depopulated. He keeps the colors muted, all the buildings are the same drab colors as the ubiquitous pigeons, expect for the periodic intrusions of bright red. Everywhere there is subtle and explicit imagery of death, the city is treated as a necropolis with its wet, eroding, stones, and abundance of scurrying rats.

 

The end-of-the-season Hotel has already draped over the furniture. Later we visit the actual catacombs beneath. A Serial Killer stalks the city, and we see a body pulled from a Canal. We also see child’s doll bobbing in the water like a drowned child. (This is the first of Roeg’s films where he is not credited as his own Cinematographer, but instead Anthony B. Richmond, and their fruitful collaboration would extend across several more films.)

 

John had brought Laura and John Jr with him, and though John and Laura are struggling, but their mutual devotion is obvious. Critic Roger Ebert noted, “The marriage of John and Laura seems real and constant in the film, not just a convenience of the plot.”

 

In a restaurant restroom Laura meets two other visitors to Venice, Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania). Heather, who is blind, claims to have PSI powers and tells Laura she “saw” dead Christine sitting with her parents at the table, laughing and smiling, “She’s happy now!”

 

This overwhelms Laura, she collapses. But this proves transformative in a positive way; that very night, probably for the first time since Christine’s death, the Baxters make love. This is perhaps the most famous sex-scene in cinema history, Ebert again, “[It] celebrated for its passion and truthfulness, but its full emotional impact comes through the editing…There is a poignancy here beyond all reason.” The two most notable elements of the scene were its unusual explicitness and how their coupling is intercut with shots the characters dressing afterwards; the physical union expressed love as passion, but a marriage is more about a shared physical comfort through all the mundanities of life, so even when they are preoccupied, they are still a couple.

 

Roeg said in an interview, “Well, I thought that it was needed because they were human and they were in love. Otherwise, they would seem to be disagreeing all the time. And they become people in their own right in the love scene, not characters in a narrative. Just like a couple. It is because of the love they have for each other that she is undefeated at the end. No one can take that love away. Not even death.”

 

The explicitness drew censorous attention, especially, and most obviously, when the movie was shown on TV. When that happened, a side-effect of Roeg’s unique command of visual story-telling became apparent. Roeg, commenting on BBC cutting that scene, “Yes and the entire film didn't work [without it]. They [the Baxter’s] were just rowing all the time. Terrible.”

 

Think about other films with explicit sex-scenes you’ve seen; can you come up with another example that the film is thrown so far off by its removal? Generally, sex scenes, especially in Horror films, are obligatory ad-ons to satisfy crass Producers and/or Distributors. With Roeg, every scene is story-telling, so removing any scene is a risky proposition.

 

The intercutting ties into other themes in this film and present in most of Roeg’s other movies. Roeg films address the subject of time through non-chronological editing even when it isn’t a subject in the plot. Here, because Precognition is a plot-point, the manners he started developing with “Performance” are far more smoothly integrated than before, but Roeg is not only interested in demonstrating plot-points, he is telling us that always, even without PSI powers coming into play. Ebert again, “our future is contained in our present--that everything passes, even ecstasy.” Here Roeg’s Editor was Graeme Clifford, but he’d used different Editors on his two prior films but retained a consistent aesthetic throughout, an indication of Roeg’s hands-on-everything approach. According to some, the roots of this style, much imitated but rarely used to the same substantive effect, was the film, “Petulia” (1968) Directed by Richard Lester, wherein Roeg was Cinematographer and the Editor was Anthony Gibbs. Roeg and Gibbs also worked together on both “Performance” and “Walkabout.”

 

Though this film is steeped in dread, there is only two shock-scare scenes, at the very beginning and the very end. Instead Roeg gives us an exquisite buildup of dread even as these two characters grope their way back towards their love.

 

Important to the plot is that John resists the promise that brought about Laura’s healing, Heather’s vision of Christine, in an afterlife, or any form of PSI power. We know he’s touched with that power, yet he continues to deny it, even as he starts having visions that deeply disturb him. He starts seeing a child in a red parka who, from the back, looks just like Christine. She’ll continually appears just a little too far away, at the end of an alley or the other side of a canal. Soon, we in the audience, start noticing the child in scenes even when John is unaware of her presence. Yet still he insists to Laura, “She’s dead, Laura. Our daughter is dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.”

 

Like many Horror films, it goes into the fray of the battle between Reason and Superstition, and being a Horror, sides with Superstition; the Hero is suffering for his arrogance in refusing to believe, and specifically, refusing to heed warnings. Like most (here a good comparison would be “Burn Witch, Burn” (1962)), there’s a presumptive Gender Politics at play as men, especially educated and professional men, represent a closed-minded rationality, while women, especially wives, carry the torch of faith. These films hammer away at the man’s Skepticism until it, and sometimes the man himself, is destroyed.

 

But in Roeg’s take on it there are no Villains to overcome (there is a Villain, the Serial Killer, but the Killers specific intersection with the plot is unique to this film) so the theme is subtler and, surprisingly, even darker. It is notable that John did act on his precognition in the first scene and still failed to save his child, and finally acts on it again in the climax, and again, there is only tragedy. All seems pre-ordained, Belief provides no better illumination, nor better protection, than Denial of the same.

 

Critic Michael Dempsey observed that Roeg was reinventing the montages created by Director Sergei Eisenstein back in the 1920s. Eisenstein, a political propagandist, created montages where the shots were part of a solid interpretation of the truth, while Roeg created montages that might be related, but then might not. We, in the audience, are as uncertain as John what the connectivity is -- what is real, and what is not.

 

Roeg again, “For me, the basic premise is that in life, nothing is what it seems. That's it, really. I felt for that idea so much I put the line into the actual script.” A significant piece of dialogue:

 

Laura: “One of your children has posed a curious question: if the world is round, why is a frozen lake flat?”

John: “Nothing is what it seems.”

 

It was John who provides what could be the film’s credo, and John who most denies it.

 

“Don't Look…” shared a Double Bill with “The Wicker Man,” another Horror film destined for Cult-status. It was a remarkable pairing really, both concern the dangers of its male hero defining his interpretations of reality through moral or philosophical ideologies (though in the end, “The Wicker Man” chose to be harsher towards Supernatural Cultism than it was on conventional Consensual Reality); they have similar shock ending that involve attempted child-rescues and deceitful images of the same and, in both cases, the child worse red. The year of these releases, 1973, proved a truly landmark year for Horror cinema, seeing also “The Exorcist,” “The Legend of Hell House,” “Sisters,” and a host of other greats, both sophisticated and campy, but these two, though near universally hailed at the time, proved to be the hardest to emulate, and with that, the these two seem less sullied by poor imitations all these years later.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUWB-Kw4FiM