Venetian Blindness

DON'T LOOK NOW is a film about second sight: that means about another way of looking at things. From the first sinister zoom into the surface of a pond broken by drizzle, we are already captured by the sudden fracturing of the reflected image. In their cozy country house in England, John and Laura Baxter are working quietly when John suddenly breaks a piece of glass, cuts himself. Blood creeps like some blotted gargoyle over the face of a color slide--it shows the interior of a Venetian church he is restoring. Outside, their little girl has just drowned, and her red slicker is floating on the water. Already we are drawn into this world, sympathizing with the wounds it suffers, informed about it as suddenly and unexpectedly as the edge cuts John Baxter, and he feels the sudden premonition that sends him running out to his daughter.

Don't Look Now is one of those films which reminds us how few possibilities of the movie camera have been explored. Part of the reason why spiritual second sight is a subject so native to film is that the medium is still so spiritual. Its mostly workday techniques are still mysteries. The connection pervades films of the sinister all the way back to the trick shots in Nosferatu. If the current techniques may look hockey in a few years--as the story already does--it will be because they are so fundamental and used with such emotional strength.

Director Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Walkabout) has done for the sudden cut what Bertollucci did for the tracking shot the day he went out and hired a guy named Marchetti--the best camera pusher in the world. He has made the mystery of the camera into a world of mystery.

The characters are beautiful people, but with a feeling of typicalness about them. The Donald Sutherland character, at least, is engaged in an intellectual, noble activity--saving Venice. The couple go to Venice to get over their daughter's death. Venice here is a beautiful city but with a feeling of danger about it. It is late autumn, the end of the tourist season, damp and windy. The strange Venetian cats are vaguely frightening. And as John says of the church he's working on: "The deeper we get the more Byzantine it gets."

In a restaurant the couple meet two older ladies, one blind, the other with a significant something in her eye. When Laura helps get the speak out of the other's eye, the blind woman beams with joy: she has second sight, she says, and has seen Laura's little girl, happy and calling to her parents from the other side. At their table Laura faints, in a slow motion crash of food and dishes, and the Baxters plunge into an encounter with spiritualism.

Ordinary things become sinister with vague understatement--something like a mob leader warning that "Mistakes can be made." The miracles that hold objects together, keep people from falling, and generally organize the world, turn inside out. Mistakes: a maid plunges into the hotel room while John is naked--one laughs, but with an echo. Coincidences: as John and Laura pass through an archway a shutter slams shut in the house above. Incidentals: in the wash room where Laura meets the two women sits a silent, Goyaesque attendant dressed in black, with an air of inexplicable mockery like the warning figures early in Death in Venice.

The camera has carefully chosen all of these things, and each choice signals its totals authority as clearly as the optician's signboard--a pair of neon glasses--that once appears behind the couple. All that is, is what it sees: without the camera's grace we are as blind as the lady with second slight, and in the country of the blind the one big eye is king.

The king controls his subjects' every emotion. There is little feeling in the spoken lines, although both Sutherland and Julie Christie are superb--all is silent, seen. The love scene, where shots of lovemaking are intercut with shots of the couple, gentle and mirrored, dressing afterwards, makes love a way of looking at (even mundane) things, and shows how sex suffuses the whole life together. It is a stunning demonstration of why film, in the right hands, is such an erotic medium, and by the way it magically holds itself apart from the surrounding sense of the sinister, reinforces our sense of how separate the camera's power is from this subject, and how much more spiritual.

That's the big problem: that the film finally has too little faith in its own second sight and comes up with a real, plot-line explanation that is not spiritual but superstitious. That's really the fault of the Daphne du Maurier story from which the film is taken, but it's all the more disturbing because it reminds us how big the gap is between the best film technique and the best film content, a desert where the best technical directors--Bertolucci or Stanley Kubrick--have often gotten caught with nothing to say, needing direction themselves. I just hope Nicolas Roeg doesn't get caught there too.