Don’t Look Now
Directed by Nic Roeg
Running time: 1h 50m | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Donald Sutherland stars in Don’t Look Now
Another week, another new streaming option. This week, STUDIOCANAL Presents launches as an option within Apple TV, available for £4.99 per month, and they have a pretty great looking library with plenty of recent hits and immortal classics.
Film itself is a form of immortality that has only been around for a blink of an eye, in historical terms. We can’t hop on YouTube and find old footage of John Milton. No-one has a video of Abraham Lincoln laughing. We can’t conjure Joan of Arc back from the dead by playing a recording of her voice. Our brains might know that these kinds of snippets don’t really bring people back from the dead, but when our eyes can see their face and our ears can hear their voice, our senses are telling us a different story, even if it’s ultimately a fake-out. These little resurrections are a form of ghost. It’s hardly surprising that some of the best cinema ever made is about death and what happens afterwards — namely grief.
Don’t Look Now, the story of a couple holidaying in a moody, almost gothic version of Venice as they attempt to process the recent death of their young daughter, will be fifty years old next year, but in some ways it is so far ahead of its time that it still feels like we’ve yet to catch up to it. Part of this feeling comes from the film’s approach to time. It’s not an obscure or difficult film, but it realises the premonitory possibilities of a medium where you can jump forwards or backwards in time in a single intuitive instant, in a way few films since have achieved.
Maybe you’ve seen Don’t Look Now. See it again. It’s a film that’s made to be watched again and again. The more that you remember about it, the more familiar you are with its beats and images, the greater the hallucinatory sense of premonition that is already baked into its bones.
DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) Story by Daphne Du Maurier | Screenplay by Allan Scott, Chris Bryant | Shot by Anthony B. Richmond | Edited by Graeme Clifford
