One of the longest and most simultaneously passionate and unsettling sex scenes in all of cinema is one between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in “Don’t Look Now.” It’s an emotionally charged scene of elegant love making, but spliced in between are shots of the two of them getting dressed separately. The images don’t belong together, but side by side, they show through creepy resonance how our lives exist in two moments. We have our memories and our often bleak visions of the future.
“Don’t Look Now” is an art-house horror classic. It’s a film that in its ether alone considers the unspoken sensations, feelings and emotions that surround death. Nicolas Roeg’s disjointed editing is strange on a narrative level, but it addresses these questions more fluidly and realistically than a standard melodrama ever could.
Sutherland and Christie play John and Laura Baxter, a married couple who has just lost their daughter by drowning in a pond behind their house. None of these images before her death are particularly pastoral. A red ball floats ominously in the scummy water, her brother runs over and shatters a piece of glass in the middle of a field, and a photo John is studying is stained blood red when he spills his drink on it.
We attain a sixth sense that something terrible will happen thanks to Roeg’s heightening of sound to something beyond diegetic. It’s as though the noises resound in our mind and not just on screen. These are sounds that will come back to haunt us.
In a jarring smash cut, we’re transported to Venice months after the incident. The Baxter son is at boarding school, and John and Laura are taking an extended work vacation to forget the past. Stray images of silverware or jewelry some how remind us of the tragedy, and we know that the Baxters must still be suffering.
Two sisters then approach Laura and claim that they can see their daughter sitting and laughing in between them. One of the women is blind and gifted with soothsayer powers of fortune telling. Laura believes them, but John is rightfully speculative. The twist is, we soon come to realize that John is actually gifted with the same second-sight. Before his son came running, John sensed that something was wrong with his daughter. Later, he gets distracted by glimpses of a girl running in a red coat through the canal streets or a naked baby doll floating in the water.
What will destroy him are not his powers but his denial. Increasingly he follows his mind astray into memories of his daughter and lashes out at his wife for bringing her up, screaming repeatedly at her, “she’s dead! Dead dead dead!”
Roeg’s gift is that he’s created a psychological horror film through cinematic treachery, not foreboding dialogue. The editing table is where Roeg usually makes his mark, but his cinematographer is capable of making Venice into an empty, otherworldly location free of rational space and time. The canals wind and arch, the suspense mounts silently and the camera is fearless on the side of ledges both inside and out of scary Gothic churches.
It’s terrifying on an aesthetic level, despite the fact that the plot follows familiar horror movie dynamics. Another filmmaker would be content to ask questions about fate and destiny, but Roeg is interested in making a film that captures the sensations that come along with such harrowing spiritual awakenings.
“The job of the artist is to make the living appear dead,” says a priest in the movie to John. It’s a testament to the tone Roeg creates. He takes these charismatic actors and performances by Sutherland and Christie and makes them dead inside. Their existence is filled with dread and chilling memories, but on the surface they don’t show it. Their minds are still locked in that sex scene full of passion, but we know that all those feelings will end soon.