Horrorfest 2010: Don't Look Now

I get to kill two birds with one stone watching DON'T LOOK NOW -- that's one more film down for horrorfest, and one more I can mark off the list of Ebert's "Great Movies" -- a list I'm working my way through, albeit slowly.

I'd never heard of DON'T LOOK NOW until compiling a list for Horrorfest 2010 -- this 1973 film stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple who has recently lost their daughter in a tragic drowning accident. The sudden death puts some distance between them as they try to recover as Sutherland's character is summoned to Venice to help restore an old cathedral.

Things get weird when two elderly women contact Christie's character after staring at from across an empty restaurant. One of them is blind and reveals herself to be a psychic (Hilary Mason). The other is her caretaker (Clelia Matania). Although they seem to mean well when they tell Christie they've seen an apparition of her dead daughter and that she's "happy," there's something definitely creepy about them.

Sutherland doesn't like it one bit as Christie gets more and more drawn into a relationship with the supposedly psychic sisters. He begins to fear that they're taking advantage of her and also begins to wonder if she might be snapping under the pressure of her loss. The sisters, meanwhile, begin to sense that Sutherland has a "second sight" of his own -- after all, as Christie relates the story of her daughter's death, it's clear that Sutherland attempted to race to her rescue before he could have possibly known that anything was wrong.

Things get even more crazy when Christie is called away to visit her son at a boarding school in England where he's been injured in an accident. In her absence, Sutherland wanders the winding streets of Venice and begins to see ghostly images of his daughter creeping down back alleys. He even sees an image of his wife, who has supposedly left town, in the company of the two mysterious sisters. Add to that the fact that there's apparently a serial killer loose in the streets, and Sutherland decides to take things to the cops.

Anyway, enough plot. Although this is a mystery of sorts with a surprise ending, it's mostly about mood and atmosphere. The other two stars of the film, other than the actors, are the film editors and the city of Venice itself.

From the opening sequence, the film is edited together in a disturbing juxtaposition of unsettling images. The trick is, most of the images on their own might seem mundane enough, but one suddenly butts up against another on odd beats that the audience doesn't expect and the whole thing starts to make you really uneasy as it unfolds. You never know what you're going to see next, or why you're going to see it, and that's basically the opposite of usual film editing, in which one shot seems to predict the next in a seamless flow. There's nothing seamless or flowing here, just a bunch of hard edges.

Similarly, the usually romantically portrayed city of Venice is presented here as a maze of dark alleys, stairways to nowhere and claustrophobic winding streets, most leading to watery dead ends (or graves). Characters are constantly losing locations they've been to before and walking in endless circles, almost as if they're caught in one of those MC Escher optical illusions. People constantly seem to be peering out of windows, and then suddenly shutting the windows as soon as they're seen. On the verge of winter, most of Venice is shutting down and all the tourists have gone home. Even Sutherland's own hotel is eager to get rid of him.

Because of the psychic theme, a lot of the film is put together slightly out of order, so you never know exactly what has already happened or is going to happen. Are these images recalling each other or predicting each other? It's unclear. It all seems to be happening at the same time. There's a love scene early in the film, famous for how graphic it was at the time, that cuts back and forth between the present and the future and plays with time so much it made me wonder if maybe Alan Parker had it in mind when he put together the stream of consciousness PINK FLOYD - THE WALL.

Another spiritual presence in the film, aside from the psychic sisters, is the Bishop overseeing the reconstruction of the cathedral Sutherland's character is working on. As played by Massimo Serato, the Bishop is worried for the well being of Sutherland but seems somewhat detached from the more immediately emotional spiritual world by the trappings of dogma and tradition.

"I wish I didn't have to believe in prophecy," he tells Sutherland. "I do, but I wish I didn't have to."

By the end of the movie, as Sutherland feverishly attempts to make logical sense out of a story that can't be rationalized, I think he thinks the opposite. He wishes he did believe in prophecy. He doesn't, but he wishes he did.