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. Continue reading “Don't Look Now (1973)”