DON'T LOOK NOW

Notes

"The soft humidity of the evening, so pleasant to walk about in earlier, had turned to rain. The strolling tourists had melted away. One or two people hurried by under umbrellas. This is what the inhabitants who live here see, he thought. This is the true life. Empty streets by night, and the dank stillness of a stagnant canal beneath shuttered houses. The rest is a bright façade put on for show, glittering by sunlight….The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone. Their heels made a ringing sound on the pavement and the rain splashed from the gutterings above. A fine ending to an evening that had started with brave hope, with innocence."
(Daphne du Maurier, Don't Look Now)

When in 1999 the BFI put together their 100 List of Favourite British Films of the 20th Century, Don't Look Now was voted in at no. 8. Such a high regard is nothing new - the film opened to exceptionally favourable reviews in 1973 and has held its own ever since as a touchstone of visually intelligent movie-making. Its two leads were at the peak of high-profile careers when it was made, and its frank, tender scene of marital lovemaking only courted the kind of controversy that attracts an audience. Opinion still seems to be divided on the use of a body-double for Julie Christie. It doesn't matter, of course, except that a debate of this kind serves to illustrate just how easily film becomes fetish, especially a film where every scene is a shard of the shattered certainty the characters (and by implication, the audience) seek to patch together.

In many ways, however, Don't Look Now is not a film obviously destined for popularity. Its narrative is oblique because it deals in clues and echoes that have to be caught on the wing. Repeated viewings enrich our experience of it, although since it was made before the home video was available, this way of seeing it can scarcely have been calculated. It's also generically difficult to categorise or (one suspects) sell. To describe it as a "chiller" begs the question of conventions and expectations. The initial set-up suggests a life-style relationship movie along the lines of Sunday, Bloody Sunday, about a brilliant couple learning that life cannot be neatened. By the end of the film, it has incorporated motiveless murder in particularly grotesque circumstances, plus a thread of supernatural meaning which is as likely to unravel as it is to tie things together. No neat solutions, but a rich web of visual signs and wonders, cross-referenced throughout the film. Despite the portents and knives, if the quintessential 70s horror film was The Exorcist, then this scarcely counts as horror at all.

One label the film can reasonably wear is that of literary adaptation. Daphne du Maurier has been well-served by the film industry, with Hitchcock's versions of Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and more particularly The Birds now perhaps looming larger than her original writings. She had no direct input into the filming of Don't Look Now, and her short story inevitably needed considerable expansion to fill out the needs of a feature-length script, but the bewildering situation of a socially-mediated character trying to see the world from an perspective he finds untenable is all hers.

The title comes from du Maurier too, and is the first line of her story, significantly uttered by John Baxter as he points out to his wife the two sisters who have caught his attention. Baxter constantly spots things, and tries to fit them into patterns. He is also a great anticipator - the moments of social discomfort to which he is particularly prone are made worse by his projection of what might happen next, or later. Somewhere under the surface of Don't Look Now lurks a farce waiting to erupt, an "Englishman Abroad" scenario about a man adrift in a city of rumours and rude hoteliers, looking for the wife he has mislaid.

Like the protagonist of a farce, Baxter's attempts to impose order onto chaos are doomed, but here the nature of the chaos is anything but lighthearted. Although the structure of the story necessitates a linear narrative with its beginning, middle and end all in their conventional places, still du Maurier's prose makes it clear that this is a fragile construct. Baxter's present is a compromise between past and future, and the presence of the latter is much stronger than he can admit. He perpetually re-orders what he observes to make it fit a reassuringly logical view of the world, but he sees it all the same. Roeg's film has a much freer hand when it comes to intercutting past, present and future, creating visual links that bleed across, staining every fresh page before it has consciously been written upon.

The retention of the title, despite its deceptive jauntiness, was essential. Counterpointed by the blind sister who claims to be embarrassingly overwhelmed by psychic "seeing", John Baxter observes more than he wants to understand. Despite her eagerness for contact with their dead daughter, it is not Laura who first notices the sisters. John sees them, and draws our attention to them with a disclaiming signal of his own incapacity to fix the temporal meaning of what he observes - Don't look now.

Director's Information

Born in 1928, Nicolas Roeg began working in the British film industry in 1947 as an editing apprentice, working his way up to cinematographer twelve years later. He photographed films for such directors as David Lean, Francois Truffaut, Richard Lester, John Schlesinger and Roger Corman before making his directorial debut in 1970 with Performance. Co-directed and written by Donald Cammell, this "star vehicle" for Mick Jagger turned was into a dark, richly textured exploration of issues of identity. Walkabout (1971i) and the David Bowie vehicle, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) gained cult status almost immediately on their releases, but like most of Roeg's work, were more likely to appeal to a dedicated than a popular audience. The 80s and 90s saw Roeg failing to build on the impressive critical status he had earned, not helped by distribution problems with films that were considered "difficult". With the exception of his adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches in 1990, Roeg's films of the last two decades have effectively been given "art-house" status. They have included Eureka (1983), Insignificance (1985), Sweet Bird of Youth (1989), Cold Heaven (1992) and Full Body Massage (1995).

What The Critics Said

"The urbane du Maurier story has been made over, the screws twisted towards intensity, by a powerful and dazzling visual texture, repeated use of associated images (breaking glass, spreading stains of water and blood) and cross-cutting which extends the action subtly in time….Roeg sees with a camera - perhaps thinks with a camera - and from the audience's point of view the title of his film could be 'do look now': visual connections are constant, swift and compelling, and the story is told through them."
Penelope Houston, Monthly Film Bulletin (Oct. 1973)

"It's difficult to pin down exactly what makes Don't Look Now so effective. From its opening, in which we witness the sudden drowning of the Baxters' daughter (brilliantly shot with pre-Steadicam hand-held by cinematographer Anthony Richmond), the film starts to creep into the subconscious. Images of water permeate the movie; red is associated both with overwhelming grief and danger. Shattered glass and empty dining rooms are equally regular symbolic motifs, while Venice, deserted and wintry, is a suitably chilly setting for the enigmatic riddle."
Adam Smith, EMPIRE

"What emerges more and more with each viewing, however, is the almost unbearable sadness at the heart of the picture. To see Julie Christie reading her fireside book during the opening is to be assaulted by the knowledge of everything she's about to lose; a sense made all the more resonant for the happiness glimpsed in the rightly-famed, loving love-making between her and Sutherland. Unforgettable."
Damien Love, UNCUT.

Credits

Laura Baxter		JULIE CHRISTIE
John Baxter		DONALD SUTHERLAND
Heather		HILARY MASON
Wendy		CLELIA MATANIA
Christine Baxter		SHARON WILLIAMS
Johnny Baxter		NICHOLAS SALTER
Bishop Barbarrigo		MASSIMO SERATO
Inspector Longhi		RENATO SCARPA
DIRECTOR		NICOLAS ROEG
SCREENPLAY		CHRIS BRYANT AND ALLAN SCOTT FROM A STORY BY DAPHNE DU MAURIER
PRODUCER		PETER KATZ
CINEMATOGRAPHY		ANTHONY B. RICHMOND
MUSIC		PINO DONAGGIO
EDITING		GRAEME CLIFFORD