Don’t Look Now, watch right now
Graeme Tuckett
Exactly 50 years ago, director Nicolas Roeg was locked in an editing suite in London with reels of film that were on their way to becoming one of the most respected horror movies and thrillers of all time. But neither Roeg nor his editor and collaborator Graeme Clifford really knew what they had on the bench.
The film they had set out to make was an adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier short story Don’t Look Now. Roeg had made several key changes while adapting it to the screen. But he retained its core. A married couple, mourning the death of their young daughter, have travelled to Venice to grieve. While they are there, they are contacted by a woman who claims to be psychic, who tells them their daughter is ‘‘still with them’’. Meanwhile, the husband begins to see visions of a young girl, always running away through a crowd or down an unreachable alleyway. One night, he tries to follow her.
On paper and on screen, Don’t Look Now is a haunting and hypnotic yarn. On release in 1973 it was divisive, with plenty of critics bemused by the elliptical story-telling and an editing style that refused to obey chronology and instead allowed the future and the present to collapse into each other in a way that – in hindsight – is perfect for a film so concerned with prediction and precognition.
The available 1970s camera and film processing technology was pushed to the limit by Roeg’s insistence on moving from deep shadow to daylight in single shots. The result was a couple of key scenes that are wildly over-exposed. Roeg loved the effect and it has become a signature of the film, often imitated – but never as effectively.
But in that edit suite, Roeg and Clifford had a more immediate problem to solve. They had the raw material of an unusually graphic and unadorned sex scene between leads Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. The footage was too gorgeous to waste. And yet cutting it together sequentially would yield a sequence that would never get past the American censors without a revenue-killing X certificate or worse.
Clifford eventually used all but nine seconds of Roeg’s ‘‘selected takes’’, but intercut shots with sequences of Christie and Sutherland, post-sex, dressing and bickering before a dinner party. The effect was beautiful – and poignant in a way that defies easy explanation. Thirty years later Steven Soderbergh would use the same technique in a brief scene in Out Of Sight – a hidden Netflix gem – and it still works.
Don’t Look Now has become one of the most revered films of the past 50 years. Even today, directors still regularly pay homage to it in their own projects. There is a clear nod to Don’t Look Now in George Miller’s Three Thousand Years Of Longing (playing in cinemas now), while Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges – also on Netflix – depicts a film crew remaking the film. References also crop up in John Crowley’s brilliant Intermission, the James Bond re-launch Casino Royale, Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners and Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
Roeg already had Performance and Walkabout on his CV in 1973. After Don’t Look Now he would direct David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, before re-emerging in 1990 with a stunning adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches.
Don’t Look Now is an unrepeatable moment in film history and still one of the very best and most influential films you will ever see.
Don’t Look Now is available to stream at AroVision, and on Apple TV.