Don't Look Now

This 1973 Nicolas Roeg film rewards the creepy urgency of its title within its first few minutes. John Baxter (Donald Sutherland), clued in by a blob of red appearing in a slide of the Venetian church he plans to restore, leaps up, runs outside, and discovers too late his young daughter submerged in a shallow pond. The paranoia, terror, and grief are devastating, but at the same time you can't help noting the clever paralleling of the red in the slide and the drowned girl's red plastic mac.

Often criticized for sacrificing substance to style, Roeg found an exhilarating balance of the two in this adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story. The sorrow and the nascent hope of John and wife Laura (Julie Christie) are palpable, but the arch detachment of the filmmaker, the ruthless intelligence of his irony, the ruthless rapid fire of his editing, and the brazen grotesquerie of much of his imagery make these precious sentiments seem a lovely bauble about to be shattered.

John does get to work on restoring his church, and while in a Venice redolent of dank malice and haunted by a serial killer he and Laura receive what seem messages from their dead child through a blind medium. Like all oracular messages, these get misread. Not so much a generic mystery as a metaphysical one, Don't Look Now disrupts not just one's expectations but the concept of expectations -- it's a critique of causality and perception, highlighted by an erotic montage of the nude couple making love intercut with their post-coital dressing for dinner. The end of our joys is immanent in their beginnings, it suggests, and all dreams of restoration conceal the grinning face of death.

-- Peter Keough