Don't Look Now
by Nicolas Roeg
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DVD details
Actor: Clelia Matania, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Julie Christie, Massimo SeratoDirector: Nicolas Roeg
Brand: CHRISTIE,JULIE
Cinematographer: Anthony B. Richmond
Producer: Anthony B. Unger
Producer: Frederick Muller
Producer: Peter Katz
Writer: Allan Scott
Writer: Chris Bryant
Writer: Daphne Du Maurier
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Running Time: 110 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-09-03
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Paramount
DVD Reviews of Don't Look Now
DVD Review: creepy deja vu
Summary: 4 Stars
While watching the newly released "Genova" with Colin Firth, a bereaved father who takes his two pre-adoloescent daughters to that far away city as a way of starting a new life without their mother, I had a nagging sensation of having experienced this movie before. The uneasy disquiet and imminent doom that pervades the film "Genova", as it drags us along labyrthinine alleys in a strange and atmospheric old-world city evoked a "familiar-unfamiliar" sensation that unsettled me on the short walk home through my quiet but now slightly menacing neighbourhood.
In a sudden flash it came to me that I was being niggled by distant memories of "Don't Look Now", which I saw only once, about forty years ago.Julie Christie, gorgeous and intense, and Donald Sutherland,younger then than Keifer now,are haunted by glimpses and hyper-real apparitions of their 10yo drowned daughter, as they negotiate the steamy canals and mysterious byways of Venice.. Even forty years after first release Dont Look Now retains that powerful sense that something is happening but you dont know what it is do you?...until the very last moment...and then it's too late. Directed by Nicholas Roeg from a story by Dapne du Maurier, "Dont Look Now" is a suspense classic, and like in "Genova", the city itself becomes a character to baffle and torment it's inhbitants to the end.
DVD Review: Hauntingly beautiful....
Summary: 5 Stars
I consider this film, "The Man Who Fell to Earth", and "Walkabout", Roeg's best films. I wish he were still making this type of beautiful movie. I saw this when it first came out and still remembered it, but it didn't ruin my pleasure in another viewing. As other reviewers have stated, it "haunts" you.
As for those that complained about the nude scene, I think that it was the most tender depiction of loving marital sex to this date. Sutherland didn't have 6-pack abs, but he did look like an attractive man in his unique way; and bless Christie for her natural breasts. It's nice to see actors in movies today with their unreal great bodies, but it's hard to relate to them in a serious film.
DVD Review: Nicholas Roeg's "Don't Look Now"
Summary: 4 Stars
Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, "Don't Look Now" is a truly creepy and totally engrossing dark thriller set in Venice. Shades of "Exorcist" and "Fallen," but with several psychic twists that will stay with you for days. Also has a nicely realized love scene with Christie and Sutherland. The first time I saw the movie I walked home from the theater in a blizzard, almost in a trance... One of my favorites. DVD Review: Moody, atmospheric thriller
Summary: 4 Stars
The Bottom Line:
Don't Look Now is a horror movie that draws much of its suspense from its starkly threatening cinematography and a director who manages to consistently convince the audience that something very wrong is about to happen; though the final reveal of who the red-caped figure is seems completely arbitrary and the narrative has its slow moments, this is on the whole a very interesting and novel horror film.
3/4
DVD Review: So close to perfect...
Summary: 2 Stars
After the tragic death of their young daughter, an architect (Donald Sutherland) and his wife (Julie Christie) move to Venice, where he attends to the arduous restoration of a church. There, the couple meet an elderly pair of English sisters (Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania), one of whom is a psychic who claims to be aware of their daughter's presence. Eventually, Sutherland's character experiences premonitions that seem to coincide with a series of murders...
This movie has been recommended to me by at least a few people of excellent taste, and its enduring popularity speaks for itself. Nonetheless, "Don't Look Now" was an enormous disappointment for me, a film that very nearly achieves greatness by exploring the nature and consequence of loss and fate, and then abandons its potential in lieu of cheap and typical antics.
Sutherland and Christie are perfectly cast and perform their parts with exceptional sensitivity. They're invariably credible, both as a loving married pair and grieving, haunted parents. In particular, Nicolas Roeg's direction of Sutherland is exceptional - he conveys even more with a grunt, a questioning glance or yearning stare than he ever does when speaking. Simultaneously creepy and affable, Hilary Mason shines as the psychic whose talents permit her to predict the story's most ruinous occurrences. Massimo Serato and Renato Scarpa are also quite fine as a comforting bishop and a sly police detective. Serato was a terrific character actor, accomplished in roles of authority figures, and especially those of ecclesiastical positions. Though his screen time here is limited, his quiet charisma is as compelling as that of the leads.
By and large, Roeg's direction is as deft as in anything else he's helmed. He shoots and tracks his actors with an obsessive focus here, and his macabre proceedings are interspersed with no small amount of clever, artful symbolism. While his composition is hardly fastidious - the persistent utilization of zooming hand-held shots results in a variety of intentionally disorienting scenes - it's always effective. Shot during the winter in some especially deteriorated locations, La Dominante has never looked quite so dreary on-screen. These surroundings facilitate a suitably gloomy milieu, and Roeg surely felt at home in such a gray and chilly environment!
As evidenced here, Roeg knows quite well how to guide characterization, pace a story with measured deliberation and make the best of an impressive location. His failure, as well as the film's, rests in his inability to effectively exhibit this story's two most potent scenes. The powerfully ominous opening and penultimate sequences that lead to these crucial moments are meticulously edited and flawlessly shot...after which the climaxes seem just that much more underwhelming. In the first of these, the effect of what could have been a chilling scene is negated by its ludicrous slow motion presentation, replete with a silly, low-pitched cry of despair; that Sutherland's performance during the entirety of this scene is so tremendous only indicates how much better it could have been if Roeg hadn't opted for inappropriate gimmickry. However, nothing else is as disappointing, as utterly insulting as this movie's ridiculous ending. While the ultimate course of events is telegraphed in one of the protagonist's visions nearly forty minutes prior, how it actually occurs is a slap in the face, a sudden, unexpected turn into schlock territory that degrades the entire story. If this was silly, insubstantial B-fare on a double bill, the ending would have been great, goofy, hilarious fun, but it isn't. This is an impeccably acted, ingeniously shot, brilliantly cut feature film of considerable depth, a meditation on the classic failure of prophecy to prevent tragedy, and of the emptiness and hopeless longing that accompanies the loss of a loved one.
Maybe the ending of this story comes off well in the Daphne Du Maurier novel from which this movie was adapted, but on-screen, it's entirely risible. Either Roeg lacks the essential Kubrickian understanding of what does and doesn't work in an adaptation, or he has a wretched sense of humor.
In spite of its brief and insurmountable flaws, "Don't Look Now" is still a unique and substantial movie that deserves a quality DVD edition. This isn't such a product. Most of the Paramount discs that I've viewed have been exceptional, so I was surprised that this was so shoddy. The famously unlistenable fidelity of the Warner Home Video editions that were released in the U.K. and Australia is reportedly worse than that of this one, which is interesting because the sound of it is awful. Much of the dialogue is barely audible and horribly mixed. The print transfer is quite bad - peculiarly grainy, and rather dim besides.
If you really want to understand what everyone is saying, you'll probably need to enable the English subtitles as I did on a second viewing. Unfortunately, quite a lot of what's spoken in English isn't afforded accompanying text, nor is any of the movie's ample Italian dialogue. As a result, those who can't speak Italian (like ME ME ME) will find it slightly difficult to understand what's going on now and again. I'm not exaggerating when I type that the dubbed French-language audio track is the single worst-produced dub that I've ever heard in my entire life. It's voiced competently, but it sounds as though it was recorded in a bathroom.
If you're looking for a specific scene then you'll have quite a task on your hands, as the movie is split into only fifteen parts. In the scene selection menu, these are presented two per screen in order to make the number seem larger and inconvenience the browsing audience. The noisy, sloppily edited theatrical trailer is also included, and it seems like the antithesis of a special feature.
For fans of this feature or of Roeg's work in general, I wish that I could recommend any edition of this movie as an alternative to this one, but the British Optimum Home Entertainment edition is said to have the same awful sound quality as the Warner DVD. All I can suggest, is this: rent, don't buy. At any price, it's just not worth paying for.
Description of Don't Look Now
Working with elements of the traditional horror genre - second sight, ESP, warnings from the dead, a mad killer - and a cinematography of disquieting beauty and dreamlike sense of dislocation, director Nicolas Roeg weaves a fabric of anxiety that questions all reality. The evocative use of the back streets of Venice is a sinister participant in the action based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. This intensely erotic and macabre film boasts outstanding performances by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.
Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now once seemed radically new with its kaleidoscopic imagery, dreamlike editing, and willingness to let mystery be mysterious on several levels of reality/illusion--plus art-house darling Julie Christie in a long, nude love scene! Nowadays, this 1974 adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier ghost story looks almost classical. Following the drowning of their child in England, Laura (Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) have come to dank, eternally dying Venice, where he is supervising the restoration of a moldering church and she is either slipping into or climbing out of madness with the help of a pair of creepy spinster sisters, one of whom can "see" even though blind. John may share this psychic power, though he resists accepting it as the canals fill with murder victims, surface realities turn shimmery as water, and a red-coated figure--the daughter's ghost?--keeps flickering in the corner of our vision. Though surreal and perplexing, the film does eventually add up, and the ending remains a real throat-grabber. --Richard T. Jameson
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