Eesh-that will wake you up.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie star in Nicholas Roeg's 1973 adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier's story. Venice has never looked less lovely, filmed almost entirely at night or on rainy days.
A couple loses a child in a drowning. Sometime later they go to Venice where the man is restoring a church. The woman meets two older women who seem to have psychic gifts and are in touch with the lost child.
The man, a non-believer in otherworldly information, is at risk again and again. A warning seems to come from the lost child.
This is a frightening movie from start to finish. Other than an extended sex scene, there are no happy minutes. Everyone seems vaguely threatening including the police, the priest, the hotel keeper, the two sisters. And yet only the final scene has any real violence in it. So cleverly done.
11 comments:
Excellent movie. Not so much scary as unsettling. Beautifully shot-Director Nicholas Roeg was a cinematographer. He also directed the another favorite of mine-Walkabout.
I haven't seen DON'T LOOK NOW but I'll track down a copy. If you and Steve like it, that's enough for me.
Very creepy.
I agree on WALKABOUT. I had fantasies about Jenny Agutter for years.
And I mean to watch that if it's on Criterion.
It is on Criterion.
WALKABOUT is a bit more self-indulgent than DON'T LOOK NOW, but it's work seeing (and even more so if one is an adolescent, as a rather better example of teen adventure/tentative sex film than most that preceded or followed, such as the similar-in-predicament films of THE BLUE LAGOON). Roeg was always good for mixing fairly explicit sexual themes with whatever else his films were about, such as CASTAWAY with Amanda Donohoe, be still my heart, and Oliver Reed, and sadly I think not yet issued on any DVD.
Horror fiction and film fans have Definitely not forgotten DON'T LOOK NOW. But outside those communities, it might not be too well-remembered. Aside from fans of Roeg, Du Maurier and the cast, or those who still speculate if some of the sex in the film was not simulated.
I was able to see DON'T LOOK NOW for the second time in unedited form, in a beautiful and outre Venice double-feature with THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS, in the very large and excellent cinema at the National Gallery of Art, for free. The Smithsonian in those decades spoiled all other museum-going for us.
WALKABOUT was broadcast unedited, though interrupted by commercials, by the San Francisco "superstation" on the Honolulu cable system we could enjoy in the summer of 1979, when I was 14yo and very much ready for teen Jenny Agutter, and sympathetic with David Gulpilil's character's mix of wonder and caution.
I had forgotten THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS. Should see that again too.
I've meant to see this one more than once, and still haven't. Thanks for the reminder, Patti.
One of my favorite films. If precognition exists, I suspect this is how it works.
I've seem it multiple times. The only one I regret was in 1974 when I went alone to Europe. I was thrilled to see it was playing at a theater in Amsterdam. Once I was started my night walk alone back to my hotel, I discovered that the many Amsterdam canals and isolated footsteps was a terribly creepy echo of "Don't Look Now"'s Venetian canals..
(Rick Libott).
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