Support The

Guardian

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle

Books Music TV & radio Art & design Film Games Classical Stage More

Don't Look Now

A vision of hell and high water

Philip French
Sun 25 Mar 2001 17.26 BST

0
Nicolas Roeg was well established as a cinematographer - he'd worked with
Truffaut, Corman, Schlesinger and Lester, and done second unit work on
Lawrence of Arabia - before he co-directed the astonishing Performance with
Donald Cammell in 1970.

Over the next decade he directed four more equally

remarkable movies: Walkabout (1971), Don't Look Now
(1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing
(1980). Roeg has made nothing of comparable interest since,
Sign up for the but these five films have secured him a permanent place in
Bookmarks email
the front rank of world film-makers.
Read more
For all the differences in the settings of these films, they have
a stylistic and thematic coherence. The editing is elliptical,
the images are hallucinatory, the eroticism is highly charged - and usually
perverse - and the central characters are all individuals suddenly dropped into
disturbing new worlds: an East End gangster hiding out with drug-taking rockers;
two children left to fend for themselves in the hostile Australian outback; an
Anglo-American alone in a sinister, wintry Venice; an extraterrestrial struggling to
understand life on earth; an American psychologist adrift in Vienna.
The greatest of these, in my view, is Don't Look Now, currently re-released in a
new print. Based on a Daphne du Maurier tale, it's the best occult thriller since
Dead of Night in 1945.

From its disturbing opening shot of two children playing in a large, watery garden
in the Home Counties to its horrendous yet curiously liberating conclusion in
Venice, it seizes our attention. Pace the title, we find it impossible to look away.

The story is simple. Laura (Julie Christie) and her architect husband John (Donald
Sutherland) lose their little daughter, drowned in their garden. Some time later,
leaving their son at prep school, they go to Venice where John is restoring a
decaying church of dubious architectural value.

Laura, on the edge of a breakdown, is persuaded by a blind, psychic Scotswoman

she meets that their dead child is trying to contact them. The rational, sceptical
John, author (or reader) of a book with the intriguing title Beyond the Fragile
Geometry of Space, pours scorn on the notion while refusing to acknowledge his
own gifts of foresight. Meanwhile, a serial killer is stalking the misty alleyways
and back canals of an autumnal Venice.

The movie is about death, creation and renewal and looks at the way we live
within our minds and memories. Its labyrinthine Venice reminds one of Borges
(who is a presiding figure in Performance); the nightmarish climax is like being
trapped inside a Piranese print and the suspense and the set pieces are worthy of
Hitchcock at his best.

Laura and John have a wonderful humanity, and this is most beautifully
expressed in the sequence where they make love in their hotel bedroom. This act,
which may provide them with another child, is approached gently and shortly
after it begins, their passionate embraces on the bed are intercut with shots of
them a little while later, happily remembering their love-making as they dress to
go out for dinner.

It is one of the subtlest, most affecting erotic sequences in the history of cinema,
and the more remarkable for involving a married couple

Since you’re here …

 … we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever
but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many
news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our
journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.
The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money
and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective
matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.

I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media to
be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m happy
to make a contribution so others with less means still have access to
information.
Thomasine F-R.

If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future would
be much more secure. For as little as £1, you can support the Guardian – and it
only takes a minute. Thank you.

Become a supporter Make a contribution

Topics
Nicolas Roeg
Festivals / Horror / Thrillers / John Schlesinger / reviews

Top 10 Historical Private Island Green card

Antivirus… Photos Not… off of… lottery…

MY OMG! MANSION USALWS.COM

ANTIVIRUS GLOBAL
REVIEW

About this Content
Most viewed

Books Music TV & radio Art & design Film Games Classical Stage

back to top

Sign up to our daily email

Email address Sign up

become a supporter advertise with us

make a contribution work for us

make a contribution work for us
securedrop contact us
ask for help complaints & corrections
terms & conditions all topics
privacy policy all contributors
cookie policy facebook
digital newspaper archive twitter

© 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.