Don’t Look Now 4K
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Don’t Look Now
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Criterion
1973 / 110 Min. / 1.85.1
Starring Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Massimo Serato, Hilary Mason
Written by Chris Bryant and Allan Scott
Photographed by Anthony Richmond
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
When is a ghost story not a ghost story? The question is at the heart of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and the answer turns out to be fairly straightforward. What isn’t straightforward is the director’s impressionistic style, a crazy quilt of sight and sound that nevertheless paints a vivid portrait of a marriage under siege.
If there is a ghost in this movie it will need a place to haunt, and Venice, with its submerged tenements and rotting alleyways, is a veritable playground for the supernatural. It is not the place for parents who have just buried their child, but that is where John and Laura Baxter find themselves. They’ve put England behind them, but not the memory of their daughter Christine and the bright red Macintosh she wore on the day she died.
Still shell-shocked by their loss, the Baxters are anxious to lose themselves: John is set to work on his latest project, the restoration of the San Nicolo dei Mendicoli, a 12th century church located in the southwest of the city. But Laura has only sightseeing to distract herself and that is where the troubles begin. When her husband complains about the crumbling holy place he’s excavating—”The deeper we get, the more Byzantine it gets”—he could be describing the decayed church or the backstreets of Venice or his own marriage.
The Baxters have managed a few strained acquaintances since their arrival, though John is immediately suspicious of the man overseeing the restoration, a Bishop named Barbarrigo, a troubled soul with the air of a man losing his religion. If John has any religion to lose, he keeps it to himself, but his wife is an open book—which might be why she’s attracted the attention of not only the shifty priest but two sisters named Wendy and Heather whose benevolence may be masking an ulterior motive.
The siblings are inseparable because they have to be—Wendy acts as the guide and helpmate for her sister, who is blind. Wendy is frightened by the city (“too many shadows—it’s like a city in aspic after a dinner party, and all the guests are dead and gone”) yet Heather feels safe here, the walls echoing above the canal give the sightless woman a kind of compass. The sisters agree on one thing; Heather, who claims to be psychic, has just seen Christine by her parents’ side, still clad in her red coat and “happy.”
“Christine is still with us.” “Laura, Christine is dead.” Instead of uniting the couple, Heather’s revelation has deepened their divide—when Laura is suddenly called back to England, that gulf widens. In her absence, Venice becomes a more perilous place for her husband; the ancient church John is working to save is collapsing on top of him and the canals—once paradigms of romance—become crime scenes; a killer is loose in Venice and bodies are being pulled from the water on a regular basis—it seems Wendy’s fear of shadows is warranted. John begins to see things that challenge his sanity; why is his wife boating in Venice when she should be home in England? And who is the tiny figure in red haunting the alleys near his hotel?
A pragmatic man, John could not be persuaded by the Bishop’s promises of a life after death or the sisters’ assurance of Christine’s presence—yet when he spies that scarlet shadow scurrying through the backstreets, the need to see his daughter again—in whatever form—takes precedence. He leaves his doubts behind and chases her. And she catches him.
When he was asked to define tragedy, Roeg said “I think that my films are funny, in the way that life is ‘funny’. Tragedy for me is something which in the end has no hope… at the end of Don’t Look Now, Julie Christie smiles!”
What Roeg is describing is a kind of cosmic joke, and the finale of Don’t Look Now delivers an apocalyptic punchline. At the moment of John’s epiphany, the director unleashes a head spinning montage laying out clues that have been in plain sight all along; church bells ring, the soundtrack soars, the mystery is solved.
Known in the ’60s for his exquisite photography on films as varied as The Masque of the Red Death and A Funny Thing happened on the way to the Forum, 1970’s Performance was Roeg’s first go-round as director (he co-directed the film with Donald Cammell). The movie starred Mick Jagger and James Fox and is in some ways a companion piece to Don’t Look Now—it blends two disparate genres (Performance is probably the first and only psychedelic mobster movie), it has a suffocating yet dreamy atmosphere (Jagger’s incense is as dense as a Venice sewer), and Roeg’s fragmented techniques, the reflections upon reflections, the near-subliminal imagery, are already in full effect.
Both Performance and Don’t Look Now are rightly famous for their forthright sexuality (though Roeg’s tricky editing sometimes makes it difficult to determine who’s on top of who), and it’s hard to imagine two actors more at home in their skin (and sometimes only in their skin) than Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Their relationship—an intimate portrait of marriage in and out of the trenches—is in pointed contrast to the unforgiving and mysterious world represented by Massimo Serato as the impenetrable Barbarrigo and Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania as the inscrutable sisters.
Screenwriters Chris Bryant and Allan Scott adapted Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now which first appeared as part of a collection of “long stories” called Not After Midnight published in 1971. The writers are faithful to du Maurier’s basic storyline with one savvy alteration; in the book, Christine dies from meningitis, not drowning—the change allowed Roeg to extend his visual motif and connect the dots between the Baxter’s lakeside home and the perils of a waterlogged Venice.
Roeg’s crew couldn’t be bettered. The editor Graeme Clifford (Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, Altman’s Images) juggles Roeg’s complex visual scheme like a master. Pino Donnagio—the composer for Carrie and The Howling—devised a wistful score with the flavor of a sinister lullaby (shades of Rosemary’s Baby) and as for the cinematographer Anthony Richmond—where to begin? He photographed 1969’s Let It Be which found new life in 2022 thanks to Peter Jackson, but he was essentially Roeg’s unofficial cameraman, having photographed all the director’s major work from 1971’s Walkabout to 1980’s Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (which could have been an apt subtitle for Don’t Look Now).
Richmond’s work on Don’t Look Now captures the beautiful horror show that is Venice and the new 4K Blu ray set from Criterion is a showcase for the cinematographer’s talent. Richmond worked with StudioCanal on the remaster and Glenn Erickson was struck by “how rich and dark it is. Roeg appears to be shooting under low-light conditions and some shots even show more grain. The colors are soft and vibrant in the domestic scenes between Sutherland and Christie.”
Criterion has brought back several previously released extras that were part of their 2015 edition including The Enigma of Film with Danny Boyle and Steven Soderbergh, Something Interesting, a short documentary on the making of the film featuring interviews with Richmond, Christie, and Sutherland, and a short feature with historian Bobbie O’Steen in conversation with Clifford.
The rest of the extras include 2002’s “Don’t Look Now”: Looking Back, with comments from Roeg and Clifford (“…the best picture I ever cut”) and “Don’t Look Now”: Death in Venice, with Donnagio on the film’s music. There’s also a Q&A with Roeg recorded in 2003 at London’s Ciné Lumière and inside the keepcase, a reprint of an essay by film critic David Thompson
Here’s John Landis on Don’t Look Now:
One of my alltime favorite movies. I have the Paramount Region A Blu-ray that uses the same StudioCanal restoration from a couple of years ago as the Criterions. It looks good & is cheaper!
(Scott wrote Argento’s Tenebrae)
Dario Argento wrote Argento’s Tenebre. Scott is listed as a co-producer of the English version, but he wasn’t the writer of the movie, and he gets no story or screenplay credits for it in any of the dozen or so Argento references I have on my shelf.
Thank you, will edit.
I’m a little shame-faced that I don’t like this film. Not then, not now, not ever. I found it depressing, dark, and dreary (the filming AND the story), and off-putting. I had to look away during the unattractive sex sequence. Still, five stars…. (grin)
Definitely an intense one. I bet that when it first got released, millions of teenage boys enjoyed a certain scene.