Don't Look Now is a 1973 thriller film directed by Nicolas
Roeg. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland star as a married couple whose lives
become complicated after meeting two elderly sisters in Venice, one of whom
claims to be clairvoyant and informs them that their recently deceased daughter
is trying to contact them and warn them of danger. It is an independent British
and Italian co-production, filmed in England and Italy, and adapted from the
short story by Daphne du Maurier.
Fig two - Scene of death.
“Boiled down to its
simplest elements, Don't Look Now is the story of John and Laura Baxter (Donald
Sutherland and Julie Christie), whose daughter Christine dies in the film's
opening scene, drowned in a pond behind their home in Britain while trying to
retrieve a ball”.(Brayton 2008) The
film starts of as calm with a little girl in a bright red coat playing outside
while her Mum and Dad are inside talking when John has a six sense and runs
outside towards a lake and finds his drowned daughter picks her up and screams
and tries to revive her but it is too late, for a start of a film what was calm
and then to have a scene of a drowned child captures the attention of its
audience with a firm grip.
“1973 film remains one
of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but
with dread, grief and apprehension” (Ebert 2002) this plunges the audience
into lives of the married couple who are in great grief over the death of the
daughter and how the couple go about dealing with it. John and Laura move to
Venice as John is being contracted by the bishop the church he’s
rebuilding.
“Arguably the subtlest
giallo ever made, it's a film to heighten the sense”s.9Croce 2010) Most of
the film is set in Venice where it has a gothic and depressive feel about the
place, helping the audience feel the grief of the couple. Laura finds peace in
two old ladies who tell her about their deceased daughter and trying to contact
them to let them know she’s happy and with them, while John doesn’t believe in
the two women and becomes slightly detached from his wife and deals with it in
his own way becoming insane, and starts to see things such as his wife on a
boat with the two women who got a plane back to England to see their son was unwell
and after finding his wife is fine and is on her way back to Italy, he ends up
following a little girl wearing a bright red coat like the one his daughter
wore at the beginning of the film into a trap where the little figure of a girl
turns round and isn’t a hallucination of his daughter but an old woman who
strikes a killing blow to John. The hallucination John had of his wife on a
boat with the two old women in black was not a hallucination but a vision as it
was of his funeral.
Illustrations -
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