The central nervous system conventionalises reality for us so that we can move through time and space … We’ve inherited large parts of our view of the world from our forebears hundreds of thousands of years ago … A sense of time gave Homo sapiens a way of storing, from minute to minute, information about the world. We may well have outgrown it. Our sense of time itself may be rather outdated.
[J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Rosetta Brooks for ZG Magazine, 1988]
The world around me can only be given form only through my spatial and temporal sense of it – but my spatial and temporal sense is formed in its turn by my dealings with the world around me.
Each of us is alone in time. My idea of you as existing now […] is largely a construction from recollection, report and pure imagination.
[Michael Frayn, The Human Touch, 2006]
What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.
But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain […] Even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.
[Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, 2018]
[Note: In the process of writing this piece, I’ve discovered that a spoiler-free discussion of Don’t Look Now is not a possibility. Please don’t read further until you’ve watched the film. That will achieve (a) a more rewarding viewing experience; and (b) the acquisition of information that may enable you to violently disagree with everything that follows (but, if you do, please don’t show up on my doorstep in a red duffle coat).
I’ve seen Don’t Look Now (1973) many times since catching a bowdlerised screening (shame on you, BBC 2) in 1979 and I think I’ve come to a stable view on its fundamental themes.
Time. Imagination. Grief. The quest for meaning.
Mind you, any critique of a film directed by Nicolas Roeg (1928-2018) is necessarily provisional. There’s a paradox at the heart of Don’t Look Now (DLN). Roeg is unflinching in his examination of the human condition, but his storytelling is opaque, hallucinatory, fragmented and spectacularly ludic: games are played with symbols, allusions and – perhaps most significantly – narrative structure. These characteristics apply to all Roeg’s early features – Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Bad Timing (1980) and Eureka (1983) – but, I would argue, are most powerfully realised in DLN.
There’s no doubt that DLN has stood the test of time. In 1999, it was ranked eighth in the BFI’s survey of greatest British films of the twentieth century; and it topped the list of Best British Films in the Time Out surveys of both 2011 and 2021.
For decades after its release, its salient talking points were the eerie and emotionally shattering opening; the traumatic and revelatory ending; and the possibility that the sex scene at the heart of the narrative was unsimulated. Speculation in relation to this drew robust rebuttals from the film’s producer, Peter Katz, and its leads, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Their denials were supported by cinematographer Anthony Richmond’s 2019 interview with BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme: Richmond’s detailed and compelling description of the shoot put the controversy to bed, so to speak.
These set pieces were cleverly crafted, innovative and emotionally resonant but there are subtler and more complex reasons for its enduring impact. Nevertheless, let’s start at the very beginning because – as Julie Andrews assures us – it’s a very good place to start. In DLN matters are complicated by the fact that aspects of its ending are embedded in its opening scenes.
‘Nothing is what it seems,’ John Baxter (Sutherland) says to his wife Laura (Christie) in reply to a comment on the curvature of Lake Ontario. In their study-cum-library, Laura is reading while John, an architect and art historian, is projecting slides of the Venetian cathedral he has been commissioned to restore. Meanwhile their children play in the extensive grounds of their estate. Their daughter, Christine – wearing a striking red raincoat – is playing with an action man and a red and white striped ball. It’s a bright day: trees cast long shadows towards a large pond and are reflected on its surface.
The film cuts to-and-fro between the cosiness of the interior and bucolic bliss of the exterior. But it’s evident that something is wrong. John notices that a slide of the Cathedral’s pews and windows contains a strange figure in a coat of the same red as his daughter’s. When the slide is set aside, and water is spilled on it, the red bleeds across the image to form an ambiguous shape – suggesting the contours of a lake at one moment, a malformed embryo the next. Meanwhile, Christine’s ball rolls into the pond. What could possibly go wrong?
***
This brisk cutting (there are seven shifts between interior to exterior) builds tension and hints at the tragedy soon to unfold. There will be a second catastrophe at the end of the film – a death in Venice charged with irony, mystery and absurdity – and both fatalities are foreshadowed in these opening scenes.
Prior to watching the films of Nic Roeg, my point of reference for cinematic foreshadowing was the trippy flashforward in the brothel scene of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. Hopper’s movie features a literal prolepsis, a brief, almost subliminally presented image that recurs in ‘reality’ in the film’s finale and reinforces its cynical fatalism.
The foreshadowing in DLN is subtle, multi-layered and ambiguous. Most is visual; some is embedded in the terse but allusive dialogue of Allan Scott and Chris Bryant’s script (an inventive reworking of a short horror story by Daphne du Maurier).
From the outset, ideas are augmented and events linked by a series of associations. Red, the colour of wounds and warning lights, recurs throughout the opening – for example, in Christine’s ball and raincoat and in the ‘bleed’ of John’s colour slide. There’s a further echo: the metaphorical puddle of blood on the image of the cathedral is an ominous echo of the dangerous depths of John and Laura’s pond. The red coat recurs later in the film: on a couple of occasions as a flicker, when John catches glimpses of a small figure scooting along the footpaths of Venice’s canals; and, finally, as a revelation, when John – believing he is reaching out to the ghost of Christine – encounters a small, murderous adult, clad in a red duffel coat and wielding a meat cleaver. The murderer is, of course, the mysterious figure on the colour slide of the cathedral interior. This, together with the gash in John’s throat and the pool of blood that forms as he dies, takes us back to the flashes of red in the opening scenes. The chromatics of a death foretold.
Some of the foreshadowing in DLN is internal to the narrative: it relates directly to the actions and perceptions of the characters. For example, the recurrence of certain symbols suggest John may be clairvoyant. Other images and events riff on the parable of Death in Samarra, in which a servant sees Death in the marketplace in Baghdad and flees to Samarra. When he arrives, he discovers death has a longstanding appointment with him – in Samarra. John’s destiny is fixed the moment he sees the figure in red on the projector slide. His yearning to learn the identity of the figure in red is an epistemological quest that ends with a grisly epiphany.
Other prefiguration is external to the narrative, affecting the viewer rather than the characters. It hints that our perception of reality may be a convenient fiction, particularly in relation to the accepted notion of time as a linear flow.
The viewer’s role – in stark contrast to John’s – is that of ontological detective. We are forced to consider the extent to which human experience is defined by time, love, loss, and imagination. But there is no revelatory moment for Roeg’s audience – the evidence he presents is ambiguous and inconclusive. DLN is a philosophical maze without an exit.
***
Water is the dominant element of DLN. It’s a resonant a symbol of the anxieties and fragilities of his characters – and his audience. The horrors dredged from the murky lagoons of Venice – where a serial killer is at work – are anticipated by the spillage from John’s knocked over glass and the duckweed lurking below the bright reflections of the family’s pond.
The presentation of Christine’s drowning is grotesque, painterly and unforgettable. Its pivotal role in the film’s symbolic structure is indicated by its absence in du Maurier’s original story, in which the child dies of meningitis. Rather than lying face-down in the water – the obvious position given that she fell in while retrieving her ball – Christine rises from the depths towards the surface, face-up, like John Everett Millais’ Ophelia in a glossy red raincoat. John plunges below the surface of the pond and emerges clutching the sodden body of his daughter. He howls. The use of slow motion for this scene establishes grief as the film’s pervasive emotions.
Sound is another vital component in the film’s nexus of symbols. For example, John’s howl jolts Laura into a realisation that calamity has befallen her family. She screams. As the scream segues into the ear-shattering whine of a highspeed drill, we cut to a canal in Venice, with John directing work on the stones of a decaying cathedral. The raucous noise supports the transition from a scene of anguish and loss in the English countryside to a losing battle against time’s assault on an ancient Venetian church.
The fading splendours of Venice have attracted the attention of a number of filmmakers concerned with dark obsession, corrupted eroticism and doomed love. Consider Losey’s Eva (1962), Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), Fellini’s Casanova (1976) and Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers (1990).
It’s a cityscape that reminds us of the impermanence of the Anthropocene: in the end it will all be swept away – people, the cultures they have created, and the edifices they have built.
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
In Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) a gigantic statue is all but erased by desert sands. In DLN, John battles a city’s reclamation by the lagoons upon which it is built. Another loss, another source of grief.
It’s the perfect mise en scene for this multilayered story. Following Christine’s death, the strange and gothic cityscape works in a paradoxical way for John and Laura. It’s a means of escaping the horrors of their everyday lives but it’s also a way of re-engaging with the world.
This paradox is also present in the much-discussed sex scene. Cutting between scenes of sexual intimacy – tender but tinged with desperation – and the mundane, emotionally neutral activity of getting dressed for dinner, it’s the one scene in which time slips between present and future without creating a portent of doom. At first the couple seem vulnerable, tentative and disconnected; then, through the subtle sexual semaphore of touch and gaze they rediscover each other’s bodies and the emotional bond between them. Sex is a form of escape and erasure in this scene; but it’s also a source of re-enchantment.
Like John’s work on the cathedral, the reaffirmation of his love for Laura is vital and beautiful but ultimately doomed. Venice doesn’t let us forget this for a moment. Strange echoing sounds – including the odd distant shout and scream – are modulated by water (canals and mist) and the city’s labyrinthine stonework (its bridges, alleys, church facias and canal-side footpaths).
***
Speaking to the BBC’s Antonia Quirk in 2019, cinematographer Anthony Richmond recalled his part in translating Roeg’s vision to the screen. The instruction he remembered most clearly was, ‘Please don’t be afraid of the dark.’
I’ve no idea if the film’s locations trigger thoughts of entropy, melancholy and impending doom for those who visit them but the decision to shoot in Venice’s winter months, often at night, and in places less well-trodden by tourists, allowed Roeg and Richmond to create an overwhelming sense of peril and despair.
Location photography is essential in conveying the ambiguities of DLN, but the performances are just as vital. Portrayed with subtle power by Sutherland and Christie, John and Laura repeatedly encounter a pair of weird and unsettling sisters, played with restraint and nuanced effect by Hilary Mason (as Heather) and Clelia Matania (Wendy). Their weirdness may encompass the sense of the word used in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Heather is blind and – the two of them claim – clairvoyant. She engages Laura’s attention by saying she can see Christine and offering assurances that the child is happy. Later she warns John his life is in danger if he remains in Venice.
For most of the film, we’re never quite sure if Heather is gifted or a fraud, or whether the sisters’ intentions are benign or malevolent. There’s a scene in which we see the see them laughing and it isn’t entirely clear whether they are amused by misleading the Baxters, experiencing an almost ecstatic form of schadenfreude, or – returning briefly to the parable of Death in Samarra – experiencing a form of hysterical despair at their inability to save John from the fate Heather has foreseen. The late writer Graham Joyce told me he was blown away by this scene, and that it had a significant impact of the development of his storytelling.
Laura is comforted by the sisters’ vision of Christine: she hears what she wants to hear. The apparent existence of an afterlife offers a positive resolution. The practical and sceptical John hears what he wants to hear too and is convinced Heather and Wendy are insane or opportunists. But who is deluded – John or Laura?
John’s death takes us back to the film’s opening, and his apparently throwaway statement that ‘nothing is what it seems.’ There are no extraneous lines in DLN: the script is light on dialogue and, in after multiple viewings, every utterance seems charged with meaning. The director and his scriptwriters have revealed there were multiple takes of Donald Sutherland delivering this line because Roeg didn’t want it to stand out as arch, sinister or portentous. His makes an early declaration of his plan to fool us and spends the rest of the movie persuading us to let him.
DLN has stood the test of time, partly because it’s the perfect collision of theme, form, structure and style; but mainly because while Roeg is drawing us into the mysterious experiences of his protagonists, he’s also challenging our understanding of time, being and the knotty issue of why on earth we’re here.
Andy Hedgecock
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