When there is a succession of quick shots through the almost mazelike streets and bridges of Venice, all seen from a character's point-of-view, you would think it would become monotonous. Making it hand-held throughout could make you seasick (hence all the included shots of the waterways). In the capable hands of wunderkind director Nicolas Roeg, they all add up to the thrill of the mystery. You keep wondering what is around the corner, and where did that red-hooded little person run off to. That is just one of the pleasures of "Don't Look Now," a truly absorbing mystery dealing with the occult and the loss of a loved one.
"Don't Look Now" could have been a depressing and bleak tale. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are the parents of two young children who play in the outside garden of their English country home. Christine is the young daughter playing with a doll who accidentally drowns. The moment is so powerful, so emotionally draining that it will leave you devastated. It begins with Sutherland, playing an architect named John Baxter, looking at an unusual picture slide of the inside of the church he will renovate, and seated is some red-cloaked figure with their back facing the lens. Suddenly, John is alerted to something awful that is about to happen, hence the drowning of his daughter. And the church slide frame slowly becomes submerged in red liquid dye in ways both suspenseful and achingly unnerving. Stunning, haunting and beautiful, which describes the rest of the film to a tee.
Julie Christie is Laura, John's wife, and she is grief-stricken but not in ways we normally see in the movies. When John and Laura are at a restaurant, older siblings sit at a nearby table taking notice of John (the siblings are played with a sliver of eerie foreboding by Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania). John doesn't know them yet Laura assists them to the bathroom since one of the siblings has something caught in her eye. The other sibling is blind and clairvoyant (Mason) and can not only sense Laura's sadness but she can see Christine as well.
"Don't Look Now" is disorientatingly beautiful as only Roeg can manage. It is strongly affecting and increasingly dramatic (though the suspense is not exactly cut from the same brand as Hitchcock), from Sutherland's John getting drunk to getting angry with Laura, to the red-cloaked figure running around Venice like a mouse, to the police who have John followed, to sightings of Laura in Venice when she's supposed to be in England, and much more. The church itself seems ominous with danger lurking somewhere, anywhere, within its confines. Nothing ever seems safe or secure, especially the hotel that is closed for the winter - its setting seems claustrophobic. "Don't Look Now" not only contains some of Sutherland's and Christie's most potent work of their careers as a married couple who try to remain balanced in their emotions, it also operates as a puzzling dream and one of not regret, but remorse for the loss of a child. Can the parents ever move forward after such a devastating loss? The answers may surprise you.
