Don't Look Now
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Movie Reviews of Don't Look Now
Movie Review: DON'T LOOK NOW!
Summary: 5 Stars
Viewed: 11/04, 12/05, 1/11
Rate: 9
12/05: Don't Look Now involves a superb build-up of tensions while the story unravels itself before the final chilling climax. Aesthetically, Don't Look Now is a beautiful film while somber in its mood. The chemistry between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland is absolutely terrific. The ten minute finale kinda throws it off a bit. Very strong editing skills are displayed in the film as the cutting work is powerfully assembled together in a photographically way. When watching Don't Look Now with somebody else, I notice that she was bored and lost her patience. That got me thinking that what new movies lack in: a slow build-up until the final climax. Don't Look Now begs for more repeated viewings. It's not very different from Rosemary's Baby, and both are similar in structure. White Noise is a close resemblance to Don't Look Now, but the modern film ran out of gas too soon because there was nothing to be revealed, only to be ended with a bad question mark. In Don't Look Now, I saw a very chilling ending, and it was well the effort of the wait. Overall, I love Don't Look Now for its aesthetic quality, and there is the great passionate love-making scene between Christie and Sutherland.
1/11: Don't Look Now is still stunning of a film, and it is also very well photographed. You can tell by the attention to details in an aesthetic manner. Many films on supernatural or telepathic powers are notoriously failures, and Don't Look Now remains of the fewest most successful ones. The reason why is the perfect acting by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. They don't make this one look corny either. The ten minute sequence of actions between making love and getting dressed to go out stands as one of the best and most legendary scenes in cinema history. What the title Don't Look Now suggests is that John Baxter chose to be oblivious to the many signals. Then in the end, he paid the price by letting himself be killed for no good reason. In a way, but probably not, it seems that the two sisters had him deliberately murdered. I could be wrong, but you never know. Nicholas Roeg was brilliant in showing his eye for details and accentuating the colors of the film, bringing the best out of objects and scenery in a subtle way. Interestingly, the movie was part of a double feature with another outstanding film called The Wicker Man. Donald Sutherland wore a curly toupee, which I liked, throughout the film. All in all, Don't Look Now is a must-see.
Movie Review: A landmark in film editing!
Summary: 5 Stars
Dont look now is a very important film because it changed the way films would be edited forever. There are several key sequences where the editing is beautifully mastered to create wonderful montages not seen since Tarkovsky - the initial child drowning accident, the love making scene shot in reverse and the shock ending. This is a wholly creative film from start to finish. The director has paid remarkable attention to the direction of colors. If you think that Spielberg was original with his girl in the red coat, then you are mistaken. This is where that vision began. The majority of the film takes place in Venice but the director has chosen to roam the more obscure and backward waterways and tunnels. The film is layered with such beautiful simplicity that is should be the goal of every film student to study this material to no end.The premise basically revolves around a personal family tragedy of a young couple, John and Laura Baxters, played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, (a magnificent match) who are trying to come to terms with the death of their daughter. Laura finds a blind clairvoyant and her sister by accident in a restaurant who claim that the dead daughter is trying to warn them of some great danger. Slowly Laura starts to crackup as John becomes increasingly angered by her belief in an supernatural afterlife and the warnings given by the medium. The ending manages to shock every time.
This film is not for everybody. The production values are minimal and most of the film was shot from the hip on a shoe-string budget. However the realism that this film conjures up is steaks and bounds ahead of most psychological horror films of its kind. The story is somewhat slow, but emotionally it packs a hell of punch. There are several background elements to the film including a bizarre series of multiple murders, missing persons and events back in England that seem almost connected to the couples genuinely heartfelt struggle to come to terms with bereavement. Essentially this film is every parents nightmare come true and the horror of the loss of a child is very strongly presented and does disturb.
This is a bleak, raw and alarming art house film with many moments that will cause the viewer some distress. The connection between the onlooker and the leading protagonists has an impact that will leave you reeling emotionally long after the film has ended.
A classic masterpiece of emotional and psychological horror.
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.
Movie Review: MOST TROUBLING, POIGNANT, HAUNTING SUSPENSE-HORROR IN YEARS
Summary: 5 Stars
Those who reject the notion of coincidence and dare to inspect a more fragile geometry of space and time will embrace this spellbinding classic which was overlooked in 1974 due to the brouhaha over "The Exorcist" and its camp shenanigans. John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) returns to watery Venice, Italy on the heels of his young daughter drowning to work on the church façade restoration of the face of Christ. The art restorationist spirals deeper into a web of ESP and quantum physics which he dismisses as "mumbo-jumbo", and refuses to confront his intuitive side... and his profound sense of guilt.
Director Roeg seduces viewers with a split-second 8 minute what-was-that-I-think-I-saw opening unlike anything ever conceived, then turns suspense and horror cliches inside out to reveal a heartbreaking portrait of a married couple wrestling with the worst grief - the death of a child.
"Don't Look Now" remains one of the most thought-provoking, troubling films ever made; Julie Christie shimmers as Sutherland's fragile wife. Massimo Serato turns in an enigmatic performace as the troubled Father Barbaraggio, who "wishes he didn't have to believe in prophecy" and whose "father also died in a fall." Pino Donaggio (Carrie, Blow Out) delivers his first film score in all of its Venetian, Vivaldi-induced splendor and melancholy; those organs rushing in at the 'denouement' chill to the bone as the sweet strings fall soon behind, and Christie's radiance in the foreground of that music remains one of cinema's greatest moments. Music lovers will also appreciate his tribute to the "Lover's Concerto" during the erotic, tender love scene much discussed on these pages.
"Don't Look Now" warns all with its title to overlook, to forgive, to get on, but the great, gothic trick is that no one who looks outside himself for meaning can take his eyes off of it.
Needless to say, viewers who think "Scream" is a horror film will be lost and/or bored. This is the thoughtful, reflective man or woman's territory, not for consumers who want to be babysat for two hours. In other words, slow-going for ADD-oids, and sublime provocation for everyone else.
Movie Review: Confusing masterpiece which might mean a lot... or nothing!
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is a masterpiece of mood, visual themes, cinematography, etc. etc. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that its reputation stems almost exclusively from its phenomenal capacity to create mood. The performances by Donald Sutherland and the gorgeous Julie Christie come straight from the gut, which I found somewhat startling, specially coming from Christie, such a classical and mannered actress. However, one gets the feeling that this film is intended to "mean" nothing, but merely to evoke, since the payoff is so famously jarring and flawed, keeping no rational relation to plausibility or even basic plot maintenance. After having seen this film for the first time, I originally thought myself incredibly stupid, for I could find no link whatsoever between the ending and the movie's plot and characters. Any sort of symbolism escaped and dodged me, which is strange, inasmuch as I am an English Lit major!! After further thought and consideration, however, I find that the film's "open-endness" is not a virtue, but rather a flaw. I read an interview with Roeg in which he himself seemed to be at a loss for words as to what the ending "symbolized"!!! Nevertheless, my 5-star review stems, as I've said before, for the movie's sheer capacity to flat-out shock and create mood.On a final note, mention must be made of the famous "love scene", intercut with post-coital shots of Christie and Sutherland dressing. This scene is, in my mind, the greatest sex scene of all time, and today's directors would be wise to review it: we never question the tenderness, "togetherness" and urgency of this couple's love-making, and the scene does not go for cheap hormonal thrills (as do inferior "thrillers", such as "Basic Instinct"), but rather fits in beautifully within the mood of the picture... Christie and Sutherland make love as an almost-cathartical release of pent-up grief.
All in all, one of the greatest pieces of mood ever, yet one of the greatest flubbed endings in history, as well...!!