Don’t Look Now (1973)

Business idea: a shop in Venice selling shiny red mackintoshes

Every generation recasts the cultural canon, but the Boomers, with their socio-political firepower, blew it all up. From Monty Python to Spike Lee, from Prince to Wolf Hall, they scorned the old orthodoxies, rediscovered forgotten gems and created a whole canon. And then never stopped going on about it. But were their choices… ok?

Grieving the accidental drowning of their daughter Christine, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) find themselves in off-season Venice, where John is helping restore a church. Laura falls in with a pair of English sisters, one of whom claims to be psychic and warns her that there is danger for them in the city. This warning seems to ring true when they hear their son has been injured while at boarding school and Laura rushes back to England to see him. John, however, believes he sees Laura still in Venice and raises a fuss, leading to the sisters being apprehended by the police. Laura returns to Venice but only just in time to make it for the shock ending.

Anyone familiar with Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) will have already realised that I’ve left several key elements out of that summary of the movie. Shiny red macs, for one; Donald Sutherland’s pallid lanky shanks, for another. I’ve also left out the context in which John thinks he sees Laura – a funeral procession – and what, precisely, that shock ending is.

This is partly out of deference for spoilers, but largely because most of those elements constitute:

The Legend

The legend of Don’t Look Now has two major parts: the ending and the sex scene.

So, here come the spoilers.

The first time you see the movie – presuming that someone like me hasn’t spoiled it for you already – the ending takes you completely by surprise. All the way through the film, you are drip-fed the fact that there is a serial killer on the loose in Venice. But as far as the audience can tell, all the victims are women and you are led to suspect the two sisters that Laura has befriended. Meanwhile you are also being drip-fed the idea that John is psychic and that the figures he keeps glimpsing, dressed in red coats like his dead daughter, are visions he is having of her ghost.

This means that when, at the end, he is stabbed in the neck by a wizened killer in a red duffle coat and bleeds out in a ruined palazzo, it comes as a shock. You finally realise that the one psychic vision he did have was of his wife attending his own funeral.

It sticks in the mind partly because of the weird little serial killer, of course, shaking its head with a kind of admonitory distress, as if it is very sorry that John finally caught up with it and now its going to have to murder him; but it’s also memorable because it's so unexpected as an event.

Up til this moment, Don’t Look Now hasn’t been a violent slasher movie. Instead it's been largely quiet, chilly and spooky, like off-season Venice itself. It's been a film about bereavement and hauntings and unresolved premonitions, both for the characters and for the audience. You know something strange is coming, but you’d never expect that. After all, this is the kind of film that has that sex scene.

The sex scene is a key part of the legend of Don’t Look Now for two reasons. One is the fact that it is extraordinarily explicit even for a ‘70s sex scene, all of which were apparently deliberately crafted to make actresses feel uncomfortable on set and teenagers uncomfortable when watching them on BBC 2 in the same room as their parents.

This led to the inevitable rumour that Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie actually had sex on set and that Roeg had simply cut out the literally pornographic bits. This is obviously nonsense, but watching today and knowing what one knows about the ‘attitudes of the time’ makes one squirm somewhat over just how happy the actors (particularly Christie) might have been with what they were being asked to do.

The other reason is how Roeg did have to cut round the explicitness to appease the censors. He chose to do this by intercutting the act with shots of the aftermath, John and Laura getting dressed and ready to go out after having had sex.

It's a brilliant choice, turning an otherwise potentially grubby sex scene into a portrait of a marriage, sex as part of an adult relationship, as a display of their married intimacy. This intercutting of mundane physical and emotional intimacy focusses us on John and Laura as a couple, placing their relationship at the core of the movie.

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The reality

The sex scene is also emblematic of the film as a whole. It is a bravura piece of filmmaking, a complex interplay of time, motion, emotion and relationship revealed entirely through montage, using the editing to build a sensory gestalt that transcends dialogue or conventional linear storytelling. It is, to a degree, showing off.

It is also very ‘70s and very on the nose. Faced with the need to establish John and Laura’s recovering relationship after Laura has been reassured about their dead daughter by the psychic sisters, it chooses to do this through sex, visual fireworks and some lovely ‘70s clothes.

But it remains, however, unusual and unexpected. It is not a thing anyone else has ever tried, or, at least, succeeded at. It's certainly more extraordinary than the shock ending.

In the decades since, horror movies have become increasingly gory and rely more and more on the startle of the jump scare rather than the building of atmosphere and discomfort.

What distinguishes Don’t Look Now is not the ending but what it's an ending to. The film itself, full of intimacy and chill, of everyday strangeness and disturbing mundanity, remains a masterclass in building sensation, creating a mood around the audience in which the story remains almost incidental, glimpsed only in the corner of frames, never where we’re looking, until the very last few minutes of the film.

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Is it ok?

What’s remarkable, looking at Don’t Look Now now, is just how chill it isn’t. On first viewing, the film feels subtle and elusive before it becomes suddenly shocking and unnerving. On rewatch it becomes evident quite how over the top it is.

Roeg takes the core themes of second sight and the failures of ‘first’ sight - the way the characters are always looking in the wrong place, looking at the past and the future instead of the present – and goes for them like a kid with a toy. Like a psychopath with a meat cleaver. Like a director on a movie set.

The film is an endless parade of visual metaphors for vision. From the beginning it is full of images of images, slides and photographs, of reflective surfaces, glass and water. From the shattered pane and garden pond of the opening to the dark windows and still canals of Venice, from mosaic tesserae to stained glass, magnifying glasses and the clouded eyes of the blind, it is full of images of sight and not-seeing.

The sex scene is constantly intercut with the characters in their hotel bathroom, which is heavily mirrored, so that they are constantly seen from many angles, reflected and extended back and forth across the screen. Donald Sutherland’s skinny bum is multiplied into the distance, the Donald Nether-lands, ever receding, just as we are seeing him multiplied across time through the editing.

That, and the red, of course. The shiny red mac their daughter was wearing when she drowned is a key symbol in the movie, echoed by the red coat the killer wears at the end. But the more you watch, the more red coats you see. Sutherland and Christie are dressed almost entirely in dull browns and tweeds, reflecting their diminished selves after their daughter’s death. Around them all of wintry Venice is muted and faded and then in the background of almost every Venetian frame is a flash of red somewhere. The whole film is haunted by Christine and, of course, the serial killer.

As well as the over the top visuals, there’s also the sound. Don’t Look Now goes heavy on the dubbing, with lots of very present foley and ADR. Foley are the sound effects laid onto a film over the action captured on location; ADR is a vague abbreviation which usually stands for ‘additional dialogue replacement’ and is a practice by which actors re-record their lines in a studio to be dubbed over the film. 

It is not that either are amateurish or distracting in Don’t Look Now, but they are subtly unsettling. The sound becomes slightly detached from the visuals and the sensation emphasises the sense that we are not looking in the right place, that we are not quite seeing correctly.

It also emphasises Don’t Look Now as a cinematic artefact, a deliberate piece of filmmaking work. Don’t Look Now is very ‘70s and displays many of the regrettable attitudes of its time: the cultural misogyny, the prurient sexuality, the othering of the disabled. But it also displays some of the more admirable attitudes, too: an approach to what film can be which is wholly different to the four-quadrant content products that dominate the 21st century multiplex.

That, and some of the most beautiful ‘70s outfits ever put on film. Seriously, that suit Donald Sutherland’s wearing in the final sequence? Worth killing him for. Assuming you can get the stains out afterwards.

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As far as twist endings go, ‘Don’t Look Now’ holds up considerably better than ‘The Usual Suspects’