Don't Look Now

The Baxters' daughter Christine drowns in a pond near their English country house. John, who was nearby reading, has a sudden premonition just before he runs out to find her — too late. Months later, John has accepted a commission to restore a church in Venice. Laura is still in deep grief. In a Venice restaurant they meet two elderly sisters, Heather and Wendy. Heather is blind and claims to be psychic. She tells Laura that she sees Christine sitting between them, laughing, that Christine is happy, that the Baxters are in danger and should leave Venice. Laura is comforted. John is skeptical. Their son Johnny is injured at school in England; Laura returns. John remains in Venice and begins seeing what appears to be Laura with the sisters in a funeral gondola. Convinced she is in danger, he searches frantically. He keeps glimpsing a small figure in a red coat resembling Christine. He follows the figure through the labyrinth of Venice's alleys. He finally corners it in a cellar. The figure turns. It is an elderly dwarf woman with a meat cleaver. She slashes his throat. As he dies, the film's earlier moments — the funeral gondola, the premonitions, the church mosaic — flash through his consciousness. He has been seeing his own death the entire film and reading it as his daughter's continued presence.

On release the film was praised as a stylistic landmark. The editing — credited to Graeme Clifford — became enormously influential. The famous love-scene intercut with the post-coital dressing of the couple was admired and imitated for decades. The film's reputation has grown steadily since.

What is rarely discussed is how precisely Roeg has built a film whose entire structure is the protagonist's clairvoyant condition. The flash-cuts are not stylistic flourish. The flash-cuts are John's actual perception. He sees the future and the past simultaneously throughout the film. He does not know he is doing it. He reads the future fragments as memory or association. The film is asking the viewer to perceive what the protagonist is perceiving while the protagonist himself fails to.

Roeg's Venice is not the postcard Venice. It is winter Venice — drained of tourists, cold, partially flooded, full of dead leaves, scaffolding, half-restored churches. The light is gray. The water in the canals is brown. The city is between seasons, between identities, between the living tourist economy and the older death-haunted spaces.

The choice of Venice is structurally precise. Venice is the city built on the water — neither land nor sea, neither solid nor fluid. It is permanently liminal. The architecture mirrors itself in the canals. Every walking path is doubled by its reflection. The labyrinth structure makes orientation difficult. People who think they are walking somewhere familiar end up somewhere unexpected. Sound carries unpredictably. Footsteps echo from sources that turn out not to exist.

This is the city for the clairvoyant film because the city itself is structurally clairvoyant. It is always seeing itself doubled. It is always somewhere between conditions. The figure in the red coat that John follows could be his daughter or a hallucination or a killer disguised — Venice itself does not distinguish. The city allows the misperception by being a place where misperceptions are constantly available.

Roeg uses the spatial confusion as the film's metaphysical engine. John pursues the figure through narrowing alleys, across bridges, into spaces that progressively detach him from any landmarks. By the time he corners the figure in the cellar, he has been fully separated from the world of streets where his rational categories apply. The killer waits in the most spatially isolated location the film has shown. The kill is the film's only spatial certainty. Everything before was the labyrinth that delivered him to it.

Don't Look Now transmits a particular and rare perception: that psychic gift, in the absence of a framework for receiving it, becomes a mechanism of its own catastrophe. The film does not argue that John should not have had the gift. The film argues that the gift, ungrounded, walked him to his death. The remedy was not the absence of the gift. The remedy would have been the training the culture no longer offers.

What the film leaves the viewer with is a permanent suspicion that some of the recurring images, dreams, and intuitions one has been receiving may not be the memories or stray associations one has filed them as. They may be perceptions of conditions that have not yet manifested. The viewer is given no equipment for distinguishing one from the other. The film, in this sense, is uncomfortable. It opens a door it cannot teach the viewer to navigate.

Roeg understood that the role of the film was to make the perception visible without pretending he could provide the integration. The integration is not the filmmaker's job. The film documents the consequence of its absence. The consequence is the cut throat in the Venice cellar. The film does not soften it. The final shot — John's blood pooling, the killer's face in close-up, the entire chain of premonitions flashing — is the film's verdict. The capacity was there. The understanding was not. The gap took everything. The film is what understanding the gap costs, presented in cinematic form so that the viewer might recognize the gap in time.