023 - Don't look now

Synopsis: Psychic forebodings disorient grieving couple in Venice (well, you try to write a synopsis in a sentence!)

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Actors: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

Date: 1973

How viewed: already in my collection 

Rating: 3/5

David Meyer says:

A complex creepy tale, the ending will scare you to death.

I say:

Don't understand how this qualifies as a DVD 'you've never heard of', but was drawn to watch it again last night as a result of comments my Film Studies tutor made about the editing (especially how Julie Christie's scream at the end of the first section transforms into the sound of drilling into the stone wall of the Venice church), and I'm still not in the right frame of mind to watch Tarkovsky's Stalker! Difficult to imagine the impact seeing this film for the first time has, but now, on the 3rd or 4th viewing, it feels a bit laboured (there's flashes of red in virtually every scene - coats, boots, hats, handbags, shop signs, bottle tops, etc etc), Venice just isn't sufficiently ominous (too many shots of empty open squares - perhaps a result of the impossibility of filming in Venice!), Julie Christie is one-dimensional, and Donald Sutherland's hair and moustache root the film firmly in the 70's. Nevertheless there are still numerous mysteries and red (ha!!) herrings: the 2 sisters laughing maniacally in their room, the demeanour of the priest (who wakes up at night at a key point in the action - is he also psychic?), the fact that at one point Donald Sutherland finds himself at the end of a blind alley and muses 'I know this place' and yet it never seems to appear again, and the significance of the 2nd shot in the film (rain through the shutters of the Venice hotel). Good, but no cigar!