Don't Look Now
by Nicolas Roeg
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Clelia Matania, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Julie Christie, Massimo SeratoDirector: Nicolas Roeg
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Running Time: 110 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-09-03
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Paramount
Movie Reviews of Don't Look Now
Movie Review: Death in Venice
Summary: 5 Stars
Nicholas Roeg's 1973 DON'T LOOK NOW may be one of the single best studio films produced during the great so-called Hollywood Renaissance of 1969-1977; it certainly is one of the most influential. Using Daphne du Maurier's brilliantly ambiguous and mysterious novella as its base, Roeg uses her ghost story to produce what is really a meditation on time and space and the way in which fiction (and particularly film) structure our epistemological awareness of them both. The primary setting is Venice during the off-season, where a wealthy couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), are recuperating from the loss of their small daughter who drowned months before on their English estate. John is working restoring a damaged sixteenth-century venetian church, while Laura is distracted by a mysterious pair of English sisters, one of whom is psychic and insists their dead daughter is trying to contact them to warn them of impending danger.
There's much more besides, and Roeg complicates matters by splintering our awareness of both physical space (by complex camera work that emphasizes reflections and disjuncture) and of time (by crosscutting future events with events taking place in diegetic time). When all this comes together, especially when John conducts a cat-and-mouse game through the labyrinthine venetian streets and alleyways looking for both his wife and for a figure in a red mackintosh that may be his dead daughter, the emphasis on filmic technique begins to go beyond mere academic exercises and to increase your sense of suspense and horror. Certain sequences have become true classics, most particularly the famous sequence of Sutherland and Christie having sex in their Venetian hotel crosscut with scenes of them dressing afterwards; everything is beautifully fractured and splintered. As with De Palma's films from the same period, horror and the uncanny are used as vehicles through which the director can show us how film disrupts all our spatio-temporal coordinates. The acting at times might seem to contemporary viewers over-the-top (particularly in the opening sequence when Sutherland fails to save his daughter from drowning and carries her muddied body into the home), but it wouldn't work if it weren't pitched at this level. Neither Sutherland nor Christie have ever been better than they are here, and they share a terrific rapport.
Summary of Don't Look Now
Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now once seemed radically new with its kaleidoscopic imagery, dreamlike editing, and willingness to let mystery be mysterious on several levels of reality/illusion--plus art-house darling Julie Christie in a long, nude love scene! Nowadays, this 1974 adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier ghost story looks almost classical. Following the drowning of their child in England, Laura (Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) have come to dank, eternally dying Venice, where he is supervising the restoration of a moldering church and she is either slipping into or climbing out of madness with the help of a pair of creepy spinster sisters, one of whom can "see" even though blind. John may share this psychic power, though he resists accepting it as the canals fill with murder victims, surface realities turn shimmery as water, and a red-coated figure--the daughter's ghost?--keeps flickering in the corner of our vision. Though surreal and perplexing, the film does eventually add up, and the ending remains a real throat-grabber. --Richard T. JamesonWorking with elements of the traditional horror genre - second sight, ESP, warnings from the dead, a mad killer - and a cinematography of disquieting beauty and dreamlike sense of dislocation, director Nicolas Roeg weaves a fabric of anxiety that questions all reality. The evocative use of the back streets of Venice is a sinister participant in the action based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. This intensely erotic and macabre film boasts outstanding performances by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.
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