Brit director Nicolas Roeg made a string of unforgettable and unique films in the early- to mid-'70s that started with his co-direction of the visually and conceptually daring Mick Jagger vehicle PERFORMANCE (1970). He followed this with 1971's WALKABOUT, another off kilter and stunning outing that featured a young Jenny Agutter lost in the wilderness of the Australian outback, and a few years later would make THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976), an enigmatic tale of a man from space (played by David Bowie). But perhaps his best work from this period came in 1973 when he took on author Daphne Du Maurier's short story "Don't Look Now." The resulting film is a truly unsettling and atmospheric experience that happens to be a thriller, but also has much, much more going for it. It's also, for newcomers to Roeg, the easiest to digest of the four films mentioned here.
Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland star as Laura and John Baxter, a married couple who, in the opening minutes of the picture, lose their young daughter in an accidental drowning. John is working at home at the time of the child's death, and he seemingly foresees the event when one of the photographic slides he's working on apparently starts to bleed. He rushes out to the pond where his daughter is, somehow aware that something is wrong, but of course he's too late. As Sutherland pulls the girl's lifeless body from the water and cradles it, he roars that distinct Sutherland-bellow of hisand Roeg cuts back to the still-bleeding slide.
Of course, the pair are devastated by the loss, and we are reacquainted with them sometime later after they have moved to Venice for Sutherland's work (he restores old churches). There Christie's Laura meets a pair of older women, one of whom claims to be a psychic who is in contact with the dead daughter. Laura embraces this idea fairly easily, hoping for any connection to her lost daughter that she can find, but Sutherland's John is not so quick to believe such talk. Meanwhile, all sorts of eerie and odd things are happening around town, not the least of which is a string of murdersand who is that mysterious figure running around the city dressed like the Baxters' daughter?
At the core of the film is the ultimate, inconsolable sadness of Christie and Sutherland's characters. Even their love scenefamous because of the "is it or isn't it real?" question that has surrounded it all these yearsis filled with grief, as the loss the two have endured permeates even that. Adding to this atmosphere is the cold and foggy location of an off-season Venice, a far cry from the romantic setting that the city is often equated with.
The film is occasionally disorienting, intentionally so, as Roeg crosscuts between the past and the present, playing with the audience's idea as to how events are flowing. A former cinematographer, Roeg's visuals are a thing to behold, and he is not afraid to stylize his film to the point of it seeming dreamlike and hallucinatory. Holding the director in checkbarelyare the performances from Christie and Sutherland. Lesser actors might have been lost in Roeg's imagery (and have beensee Bowie in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH), but one can't imagine DON'T LOOK NOW without these two at the center of it.
The newly mastered anamorphic widescreen transfer on this disc looks surprisingly good considering the age of the film, though the mono audio is a bit of a disappointment. A theatrical trailer is the only extra feature here, and while it's creepy, it also looks terribly worn. Unfortunately, the Region 2 version of this disc includes a couple of other supplements (including a featurette) but for some reason us Yanks aren't quite as lucky. Maybe it's just as well, because DON'T LOOK NOW is just begging for a deluxe Criterion edition sometime soon.
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