Nicolas Roeg
“Don't Look Now” is a fortuitous visionary manifesto of Nicolas Roeg, based on a Daphne du Mauriers's mystic story and scripted by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant. This psychological horror totally breaks the typical occult conventions of those years film, investigating the folds of unconscious through the super acting of Donald Sutherland & Julie Christie as the anguished couple in love that moved to Venice with the attempt to overcome the loss of their little daughter (Christine).
Once in Venice the prismatic hallucination begins. They meet spinster sisters, one who is blind tells the grieving Christine that she has 'seen' her daughter. The plot gets scarier by minute due to an uninterrupted flow and the evocation of a sense of forboding that builds an horrific climax. Set for the most part in a rarefied and spectral Venice off season, whose streets are dark arteries of the soul and whose dark crannies are full of blinding and powerful visions.
In this subdued nightmare also finds palce the romantic Venice cliché with the 'sex scene' made by subtle crafted cuts between 'getting dressed' and 'making love' segments. The film reconstructs elective affinities between foreigners in foreign country, where they are tied to a strange city and to supernatural unknow agents which manipulate them, in order to create magical enigmatic glimpses in the lagoon. A sort of an Escherian journey without destination, void of logical explanations and detached from space-time continuum represented. What seems to interest Roeg is to indicate the direction of the journey, suggesting an horror perspective that emerges from the semantic and enigmatic logics of an avant garde editing and a symbolic directioral style.
Don’t look now
director NICOLAS ROEG
year 1973
director of photography ANTHONY B. RICHMOND
cast LAURA BAXTER, JOHN BAXTER, HILARY MASON and MASSIMO SERATO
words SILVIA GAIA MARCELLI
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