And now don't look - one of the most influential films, which is regularly criticized for its style, use of red, dark shots of Venice, the famous sex scene, the lush score of Pino Donagio, and for the sudden, knocking out the ground from under the feet ending. We are not just a scary movie, because it dared to be something else, something deeper, primitive and disturbing.
Cinema itself is a form of immortality that exists only in the blink of an eye, from a historical point of view. We can't go on YouTube and find old footage of John Milton. No one has a video of Abraham Lincoln laughing. We cannot summon Joan of Arc from the dead by reproducing a recording of her voice. Our brains may know that these sorts of fragments don’t actually raise people from the dead, but when our eyes can see their faces and our ears can hear their voice, our senses tell us a different story, even if it’s ultimately a fake. These little resurrections are a form of ghost. Unsurprisingly, some of the best films ever made are about death and what happens after it, namely grief.
Now Don't Look, the story of a couple vacationing in a morose, almost Gothic version of Venice, trying to survive the recent death of their young daughter. This year, this tape turned fifty years old, but in some ways it was so ahead of its time that we have yet to catch up. Part of that feeling has to do with the film's approach to time. Rogue’s impressionist style leaps in chronology, jumping forward or backward with reference montage to amplify emotion or warn of something terrible. Its structure follows a symbolic code, using numerous repetitive motifs, like disparate pieces of a puzzle whose picture never becomes whole until the shocking finale.
From the outset, it becomes apparent that this film is a decoding of a stream of images, as if Rogue had tapped directly into our visual receptors to download an excess of clues that can only be reconciled and interpreted retroactively. The story moves forward linearly, but then flashes of past and future events burst into the screen, acting as a sudden, disorienting picture received by the psychic gaze of the protagonist.
You may have been watching “Don’t Look Now.” Look again. This is a movie that was made to be watched over and over again. The more you remember about him, the more familiar you are with his rhythms and images, the stronger the hallucinatory sense of foreboding that is already embedded in his bones.
We are facing one of the greatest puzzles of cinema, the real horror of which is that we are all completely powerless in the hands of fate.
The dark story begins with a family drama to add more mystery to the events. Director Nicholas Rogue focuses on small details at the beginning to draw parallels. The game of color is expressed in a random photo, in an emphasis on the red color, which completely masters the daughter of the couple Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.
Suspense in the form of a red cloak daughter as a ghost becomes the object of attention. After the exhibition, the events take us to Venice, with its beautiful canals, gondolas and mentality. Thanks to the filming of the 70s (I really don’t know what it is called), the film is perceived in a completely different way. We don’t just meet our parents after a tragedy, we experience all the emotions with them, until random, strange women appear at dinner.
Tension increases with each minute, in addition, the soundtrack tells you where to focus and what to do. During the first act of the film, you feel like something is wrong. Women instill both fear and curiosity, strongly influencing the heroine of Julie. The first doubts appear after a clear description of the tragedy. The picture confuses one thing, and gives a completely different.
Some scenes are perfectly shot. Intimacy, flying on a rope, focusing on a blind female medium to show the connection of everything that is happening. Everyone seems to have gotten used to the drama until an important call arrives, leaving Donald alone in Venice. At the same time, strange incidents occur around: the murder, the body of a woman found in the Grand Canal, the night pursuit, reflecting the fear of the past. All the details work perfectly, leaving the viewer with questions and excitement.
What's going on in general? These are random visions. Is the world going crazy or is it the main character? Who's chasing him? Why does he find these strange women everywhere? The whirlwind of events triggers its own investigation, the search for truth. The police seem to sneer, the owner of the hotel remains in the dark, strange women cause a lot of suspicion, the ghost in a red cape forces the rushing heads to chase. This is so coolly filmed and shown to convey a terrifying tone. Either it’s all a game (like David Fincher), or it’s the hero who goes crazy, but when allegories come, the footage is repeated, it just turns everything upside down.
The tape ends dramatically, closes questions as much as possible, but still manages to give out mysterious coincidences. Turns out the gondola was... It turns out that the ghost in the cloak was not... And here are the givers who make this film in its own beautiful and refined way.
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You know, one day I was very lucky, and I got my hands on a Nicholas Roeg film CD. This disc fell into my hands by accident, and there were only three films on it – “The Roundabout”, “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and of course “Don’t Look Now”. I watched one movie every day and enjoyed Roeg’s films a lot.
Don't Look Now is Roeg's second independent film. Of course, this is not his best film, because the film “Around” will be a little stronger, but if you do not compare the films of Roeg, then we have a very interesting picture that should not be missed. In the center of the picture is a married couple, their daughter accidentally dies. Shock! They move to another city, namely Venice, to try to forget, but this is never forgotten.
Rogue took on the leading roles of great actors – Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. I really liked them in this movie, especially Sutherland. This is probably his best role of his entire career. This film is very difficult to advise everyone, because Rogue shot a very dark and slightly incomprehensible picture. Everything will fall into place only at the end of the film. This film puts a lot of pressure on you and squeezes your heart.
There will also be key moments in the film that I don’t recommend skipping, because that’s what your understanding of the story will depend on. You need to watch this movie very carefully and then you will enjoy the movie. Some critics called this film the most terrible in the English cinema of the seventies. If you are interested in the director Nicholas Rogue, then I advise you to get acquainted with the film – “Now don’t look.” This is a very cold and dirty movie that will scare you and make you cry at the very end.
If you ever need to make fun of someone, I recommend watching this movie. He is from the series "You will not wish the enemy." It is possible to shoot more boring, but no one has tried. A lot of things the director pumped up, a lot of things wove and covered. It's impossible to understand why. It's like a wisdom tooth treatment.
Life is complicated, and sometimes bad things happen. The worst part is losing a loved one or family member. It may seem that the whole world collapsed overnight, and the chest is so empty that it seems that the rest of life has lost any meaning. At such moments, the psychological and emotional state of a person is weakened, like ordinary immunity, allowing any parasitic “evil” to penetrate into our lives. A person may become so fixated on their grief that they do not notice how the real danger has come close to them and their loved ones. In a similar situation are the main characters of the mystical thriller “Now do not look.”
In the family of the wife of John and Laura Baxter there was a terrible tragedy. Their only daughter accidentally drowned in a pond just outside their home while playing ball. In order to somehow distract and change the situation, John accepts an offer to work in Venice, where the mind will be engaged in the restoration of an ancient church. After moving for a while, the Baxters do get better, but one day they accidentally meet two elderly sisters, one of whom claims to be in contact with their deceased daughter, who wants to warn parents from mortal danger.
It is worth saying that “Don’t Look Now” is not a standard horror film, but a more sublime movie in which horror, mysticism and drama are simultaneously mixed. This syncretism is expressed in acting, because in the film we see unique images of characters in whose lives began to occur mystical and frightening events. So, Julie Christie played the role of Laura, who as a mother the death of a child was very difficult, but the belief that her daughter in a better world helped to heal from this grief. Danald Sutherland played the role of John, perhaps the complete opposite of Laura. At first it seems that he quickly and best accepted the death of his daughter, but in reality the bitterness of the loss only disappeared deep inside and eventually escapes, leading John into a deadly trap.
Directing “Now Don’t Look” is a classic example of a high-quality mystical thriller, where the supernatural and the game of the human imagination are subtly mixed, behind the syncretism of which lies a deep philosophical idea, which I already talked about in the introduction. In fact, we see how the family couple copes with tragic events. They are simultaneously trying to distract themselves, to forget, even to change their place of residence to focus on other things. The loss of a child is not something that will be forgotten. Therefore, each of the heroes copes in his own way and finds healing in his own way. However, if the main character copes through faith in the mystical, the main character tries to escape through denial. The problem is that in his case it acquires the effect of a tight spring, which at a certain moment bursts, sowing chaos around its fragments. At the same time, it is worth noting that the film turned out to be a bit protracted and overloaded with a dramatic component. It really lacked suspense, a sense of frightening mystery and unpredictability.
The plot of the film begins a quiet family weekend in the country house of the Baxter family. While John studies slides with photos of the church he is restoring, and Laura digs into scientific books to prove to her daughter that some bodies of water on Earth are not flat, their children play unattended on the street. Suddenly, Jonah is visited by a vision, after which he rushes headlong into the street to find his daughter drowned in a pond. This event becomes the starting point of subsequent events that played out in the heads of the main characters. To distract themselves, the couple give their son to a boarding school, and they go on a business trip to John in Venice, where he must take up the restoration of an ancient church. Meanwhile, a wave of brutal murders rolls through the city, as if a maniac appeared in the city. Sami John and Laura meet two elderly sisters, tourists who came to Venice. One of them turns out to be a medium, and claims to have come into contact with Laura’s deceased daughter, and that she tells her parents that she’s okay. But soon the daughter sends another message that the parents are in mortal danger, and they should be extremely careful. If Laura takes this message seriously, John finds this state of affairs repellent and irritable. At the same time, John is witnessing strange events happening around him. Then in the waters of the Venetian canal he sees the corpse of his daughter, then among the labyrinths of the streets he sees a child in a red cloak - the same in which his daughter died. Reality and fiction are closely intertwined, and therefore it will be difficult for the heroes to distinguish what only seems and what poses a real danger.
In general, “Don’t Look Now” is a relatively good mystical thriller with a beautiful visual component and a stylish work of the operator. At the same time, it really feels more like a dramatic movie than a thriller or even a horror movie. The film lacks a full-fledged suspense, a greater reveal of the storyline surrounding the Venice murders. The authors put more emphasis on the inner world of the characters, leaving everything else pure background. So it's a matter of taste.
From the beginning, Nicholas Rogue introduces many details, images and symbols into the film narrative, which continue to play an important role throughout the film. First of all, it concerns the symbolism of red. Red cloak, scarf and boots, a ball, a pack of cigarettes, blood coming from a cut finger - the color attracts attention in a number of scenes. Secondly, water is of particular importance for the development of the plot: a pond next to a house in England, numerous canals in Venice. The director also often shows reflections in water, mirrors and glass. In addition, the main character comes to Venice to restore the church, which allows Rogue to use Catholic images in the film. Venice is one of the main characters in the film. The tourist season is over: deep autumn increases the feeling of longing, and empty streets emphasize the loneliness of the heroes. The city, deprived of the romance inherent in it in the warm season, expresses the psychological state of the parents who lost their child. Venetian channels remind the married couple of the Baxters of the ill-fated pond that took the life of their daughter.
The key elements of the directorial style we can include parallel editing, the imposition of plans. At the same time, parallel frames are often built on the principle of associative similarity. It is noteworthy that in the “Bypass” released two years earlier, Rogue succeeded in using opposition editing. And in “Now Don’t Look,” the director draws the viewer’s attention not to the contrast, but to the visual similarity between the neighboring shots. So, the operator removes Christie’s reflection inverted in the pond, and in the next frame, her father inserts an inverted film into the projector. Or the girl throws a red and white ball into the water, while Mr. Baxter throws his wife a red and white pack of cigarettes. In addition, Roeg’s “nervous” montage rhythm increases anxiety and tension.
Rethinking, reworking and reciprocal influences are undoubtedly an essential part of the film industry, without which many of its outstanding creations would not have been born. Especially stand out among them are independent and bright films, However, this work of director Roeg can cause the viewer the following memories and associations:
Venice, the grace of which you quickly forget when trouble comes. The inconsolable married couple... A distraught father, rushing through the desolate and threatening streets of a recently beautiful city in search of his daughter. New mysteries and searches filled with obsessed determination and thirst for revenge. Beautiful music by a famous Italian composer. .
Here's this, a little above - about the film Aldo Lado 'Who saw her death?', released a year earlier ' Don't Look.', with rarely filmed ' the second Bond' George Lazenby and the brilliant soundtrack Ennio Morricone. And in comparison with it, it would seem much more direct and not so catchy, Roag's work for me is not only depressingly secondary, but also creatively indistinct work, in which the director seems to try to use the Italian edge-horror at its peak with all its evasive hints, charades, the aroma of mysticism and visual tricks, pragmatically wrapping it in artificial robes of his own design.
As a result, overloaded with excessive aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics, torn from the roots, and therefore dried up and helpless, as its culmination, for which you are waiting for the end of almost two hours of traction, the plot & #39; And now do not look & #39; as if it hums with penetrating emptiness and cold, hiding behind a beautiful picture and intensified attempts to whip up the soul-stricking atmosphere.
In this context, it is worth recalling that non-standard variations of the Italo-thriller, in which, as in the mystic-surrealist fog, genre boundaries are mixed, the Italians themselves did quite qualitatively earlier, more beautiful and natural, and without looking at foreign film achievements, for example, ' Short night of glass dolls' the same Lado. So here Rogue, demonstratively rattling an elephant in a china shop on foreign territory, is very secondary.
To be fair, all of the above does not want to be attributed to the play of good actors, battling like a butterfly on the cold edge of the directed task, nor to the beautiful music of Pino Donagio, nor to other visual elements of the film. So, we can only talk first of all about the director’s and partly script punctures, especially obvious against the background of not so hyped, but much more natural and lively ' primary sources'.
The script is based on the story of the famous British writer Daphne du Maurier “Don’t look back”, but in the main points it is very distorted, which makes it very limited. Because of this, the behavior of the main character, played by D. Sutherland, sometimes looks unnatural, and further events that occur to him sometimes seem absurd. Apparently, the director pursued an experimental and artistic goal, being fond of a sharp change of frames, endlessly tense music; playing on the contrast of English landscapes with Venetian ones, thereby sharing the lives of the heroes before and after the tragic event in their family.
The Gothic atmosphere in the film is well conveyed due to the ancient architecture of Venice, but shown from the gloomy side - cold and gray: with craggy and dilapidated walls, with a series of deserted and endless alleys, sometimes ending in a dead end, and a permanent celestial darkness. And changing the display of water and glass, combining a bright red color with a frowning landscape, N. Rogue to some extent created tangible images of paranormal reality.
But for a film with a timeline of almost two hours, there are very few moments that can be identified as turning points in the plot. At the same time, there are too many long walks along the canals with dilapidated buildings, along the intricate corridors of buildings; there are several scenes designed to scare the viewer, but they do not produce the desired effect.
In general, the whole film is on the same wavelength, where everything looks kind of painfully dying and extremely boring. Even, designed for surprise, the finale, like the exit of the character from the picture of Bosch, does not make the desired impression.
In the Correr Museum there is a picture of an unknown German artist, vaguely attributed to the imitators of Bosch, with the Bosch plot of the Temptation of St. Anthony. On it, the saint with the face of a crafty eagle with a gesture filled with graceful infirmity holds a crucifix in front of the host of habitually toy evil spirits - eggs on the legs of dragonflies, separately existing noses, ears and shameful places, living skeletons composed biologically arbitrarily (' here is the skull on the goose neck spins in a red cap'); - and three virgins in the foreground. Virgos would be good for everyone, but everyone lacks something for bodily fullness - legs, arms, eyes, chest. Maidens are mutilated, wretched, inferior, organized with opportunities. Similar temptations are scattered throughout other Venetian municipal and private collections (the Gallery of Franchetti, the Palazzo Mocenigo, the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, the abode of Mariano Fortuni), concentrating in the Pinacoteca Egidio Martini in Ca Rezzonico, where the temptations of St. Anthony are hanging either four or five. It is not the temptation of the voluptuous feminine charm that becomes the strongest in Venice, not the bait of the demonic, the vices of symbolizing ugliness, but the quiet temptation of bodily, beheaded squalor, which inspires too tenacious, too curious pity, which draws loose in its empathies on the other side of the border of image and likeness. With the undead, the pseudo-Boschov Venetian infirmity closes, with culture - its stumps.
' Don't look back', one of Daphne Dumorie's late horrors, somehow turned out on its own: a healthy, ruddy, prolific norm, hurt by misfortune, at the same time shuns socio-anthropological marginality, and is attracted to it for a connection with the other world, where you want to smuggle in to make sure that the adored creature has died not everything, it sees, hears, speaks, loves, warns, happily. In Rogue’s film, admittedly superior to the book’s original source, the concentration of this gentle danger, dangerous tenderness is even higher, the meanings and intuitions are doubled with even more shaky mirroriness, and we do not know until the last minute for sure which of the wretched is God’s man, called to warn and protect the rooted in earthly reality, and who is murderously jealous of the bodily fair out of his ugliness. Floods of ugliness - both good and vicious - are sinister in Roeg equally, with one incompetence they invade the world of the fully alive, attracted by a fresh breach in their armor, equally encroach on the integrity of this world, on reducing it even one step closer to the almshouse, to the hospital, to the infirmary.
And Venice is their accomplice. The camera of Nicholas Rouge (the director shot the city only himself, giving Anthony Richmond the work with actors) builds interaction with the city of the British exactly according to the quote of Pasternak from ' Security Charter': ' When, before landing in the gondola, hired at the station, the British last linger on Piazette in poses that would be natural when saying goodbye to a living face, the square is jealous of them more acutely that, as you know, none of the European cultures approached Italy so close;39 The Baxter couple, strong British middles (a mansion in a green flowering village, a son in a private school, a money-making, prestigious engineering and artistic specialty of her husband), initially do not see Venice as her elusive romance. Not for them fog-fogs, campanils in azure lagoons, seen through windows carved with shamrocks, baroque elizumas of soffito, masquerade rags in shops. The city is dirty, the embankment of Schiavoni is cluttered with some shenanigans, the facade of the church of San Nicolo dei Mendicoli (St. Nicholas for a rolling goal, if literally), which John Baxter contracted to restore, is ineptly crumbled. Beauty sneaks up imperceptibly, like a lunatic with a razor in his hand - through the involuntary kiss of John with a gargoyle-capital of one of the church columns, through the chilling cold of the set marble of the floor, which falls into a nervous fainting unhappy Laura, through the rustle of the Biennale gardens over Venice sitting on a lion in glory, through the drowned Venice of the guerrilla monument Veneto there, by the gardens.
The city challenges English first-classness, rationality, power. He accumulates the corpses of people and dolls in the canals, the Italian, full of hidden meanings, the nonsense of manuals, instructions, instructions, the confusion of bridges, canals, calle and sottoportego. He palpably blushes the facades from beginning to end, persistently returning the orphaned father to his personal horror - the drowned daughter in a red cape (never, never buy children red raincoats, only yellow, yellow only!). He arbitrarily mixes his own geography, placing Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Castello, transferring from Salute to Scalzi in two minutes, and even with a patient on a stretcher, planting a scandalous, naked statue of a cardinal from Ca Pesaro under a soutana - in a real cardinal office. To humble the proud and healthy is forced by Venice, loving the complexity of pain – not necessarily a saint, not necessarily a Christian martyr. She cherishes the tormenting dreams of a cruel mother, ruthless Nature, crooked cacti, shoots of whitewash, and snakes and lizards rejected childbirth, blind, lame, hunchbacks, poor slaves who did not know freedom, rooks, broken by gaie waves.
A good movie is famous for the fact that every next viewing is still interesting, revealing elusive fragments, initially seen only casually. The picture under consideration by Nicholas Roeg is perfect for confirming this, because its multi-layered plot is very difficult, absorbing a number of genres that harmoniously flow into each other, leading to an impressive finale that earned a cult status in cinema. Having chosen the story of Daphne Du Maurier, which many people know by the literary foundations for the productions of Alfred Hitchcock, the director immediately set himself the primary task of moving away from the film adaptation of just a horror story from the book collection of midnight horror films. Because of this, the author skillfully played the material, starting with a detailed family drama of spouses who lost their daughter, coming to Venice for her husband’s work, where gradually, as if gradually approaching them, a real thriller about a mysterious maniac unfolds. However, this is not the main theme of the story. From the most tragic prologue with the death of a child, which the lead actor Donald Sutherland still can not view without a grimace of pain on the face due to the powerful emotional response to the scene played, the attentive viewer understands that the tape tells about the hidden mysticism of the gift of clairvoyance, which has a father. The root of the unhappiness lies in his inability to realize it in time, in order to see what is inaccessible to others, which is consonant with the title of the picture. Throughout the story, small clues are opened to him, which are sensitively grasped by intuition, focusing on colors in space, objects encountered, apprehensions or even touching the walls with his hand, as if he had already been here, but not yet – he will certainly be there in the future. Indicatively, the hero is engaged in the restoration of an ancient church, picking up tiny glass panes to the broken mosaic at high altitude, balancing between a deadly fall and a miraculous deliverance, because this metaphorically represents the fate of a character whose life hung in the air surrounded by saving hints. If he manages to assemble a common puzzle from them, he will see the whole picture, be horrified and be saved. However, is it possible to escape from fate, even feeling mortal danger and warning déjà vu, irrationally leading to a sad outcome? It's all in the lens of an elusive mysticism. She is given an almost invisible, but significant role in the production, which, like cement, glues together the disparate building blocks of narrative. Especially important here is the turning scene on the water, cleverly presented between the cases, when the husband notices his wife swimming past in all black, as if in mourning, but she flew away and this simply can not be, so he begins to search for what has not yet happened, what is coming, where he only managed to look for a moment in order to protect himself or, on the contrary, to outline a quick path to the prepared tragedy.
Thanks to this, the supernatural component of the film is transferred to the screen in the most delicate way, reminiscent of a modernized Gothic thriller about an imminent curse or obscure ghosts of the past, whose presence is felt even by the viewer, while they skillfully avoid appearing before us or characters, reflecting somewhere in changing ripples on the water, blind eyes or appearing as blurred phantoms of memory. According to Roeg, the lion’s share of the atmosphere of the picture was assigned to the musical accompaniment, which he was lucky to find from an almost accidentally presented local composer. It was the Venetian Pino Donagio. The future honored maestro had a good singing career, the Festival in San Remo thundered behind his shoulders, but he was still young, whose age slightly exceeded thirty, and there was no experience in cinema. But his stunning music conquered the director, wrapping the story in a thick aura of something creepy that invisibly overtakes the characters involved in the fatal game, whose rules are mysterious, and the stake is life. Donaggio has always emphasized that he likes to compose music just to the action genres that allow you to resort to the strongest emotions, so in his debut he succinctly reflected the range of feelings, where you can hear compressed sadness, a mystical plume of unknown anxiety and something beautifully sublime, as if pacifying redemption, lifting a suffering soul to heaven. The apogee of the film is truly virtuoso in the combination of a whole cascade of various scenes, agonizing in a quick change at the behest of a director with extensive experience of the operator, who managed to colorfully put those very scattered pieces of the overall picture together, while a penetrating motif sounds, covering the sad tragedy with a majestic increase in wonderful music.
On the screen mesmerizingly presented not only the story of the characters, but Venice itself in the key necessary for the genre, which is both beautiful and sullen Necropolis. Among the stone pavements and ancient buildings with a touch of decomposition from the water, each street at night turns into a gloomy labyrinth without time, covered with fog under your feet. In this realm of viscous suspense, skillfully woven from shadows, the splash of cold water, the echoes of knocking heels, laughter, sighs, it seems as if any patterned forged gates can easily let into the otherworldly space with living nightmares of reality. Perhaps the picture is one of those that the more you look, the more interesting they become, exposing many filigree nuances, layers and hints. They are exactly like mysterious revelations to the main character, able to see the past and the future simultaneously in the present, but all this appears chaotically scattered shards of glass, which often appears in the frame, demonstrating the fragility and deadly sharpness. And once again, the heart freezes in the climax, I want to shout that the hero certainly did not look there, everything rushes with breakneck speed, the head goes around, shots flash, time is lost, and then trembling with the onset of the main musical theme of the film, fascinating with its beauty and tragedy.
This movie really grabs the soul. It is one of those few films that really want to rank among the genres of “thriller” and “mysticism”. Characters sincerely empathize, they seem to be living people with their own experiences and motives. In the course of the story, the viewer delves deeper into an intricate series of absurd and seemingly unrelated events, like the main character of the film, he does not understand what is happening around and also builds dozens of absurd theories that replace each other over time.
The film has a measured, leisurely pace of storytelling, but it only plays into the hands of the general atmosphere and contributes to greater involvement of the viewer in what is happening. It's melancholy, it's absurd in some places, it has a lot of unnecessary scenes. Such a movie is clearly not going to appeal to everyone, but it really deserves attention at least because of the bizarre images that the director opens to the viewer’s eye.
The film is recommended as “one of the most terrible films of all time” and “classic”, but after watching it, it seemed to me that over time, all the charm ran out of it.
Young Donald Sutherland with a ridiculous mustache, ridiculous hairstyle and in a ridiculous blue coat demonstrates theatrical hypertrophied emotions, because of which I did not have sympathy for his character.
Mystical elements of the plot were perceived as the madness of the characters. The blood the director shows is more like a metaphor than blood. Once again, I remembered how successfully Hitchcock played on the nerves of the audience, making the blood in Psycho black.
Venice in the film does not look as gloomy as dilapidated. The same problem with mystic old women.
The only reason I watched the movie to the end without rewinding is the young Julie Christie. Unlike Sutherland, it is very natural and sympathetic.
No wonder in the reviews extoll the love scene - frames of passion are diluted with shots where the characters dress, going somewhere, and this is the best way to show the beauty of life in a couple.
The film is worth watching, nostalgic about film cinema or enjoying the drama against the background of Venice, but spoiled by two thousand connoisseurs of thrillers and horror, the film will not impress.
The murky ripples of the pond closed over the body of the little daughter of the Baxters, and only a cry of despair of her father managed to break the drenched silence of that unhappy morning. It will take some time, and suffered irreparable loss, the family couple will find themselves in Venice, where he restores the old church, and she spends time idle contemplating the sun’s glare on the moving waters of countless canals. Bitter memories dominate John and Laura, but everything will be changed by a chance encounter with two elderly sisters. One of them, a blind medium, claims that the dead girl is still near her parents and tries to warn them of imminent danger. Strangely, unexpectedly, it looks like some clever trick... But the wife happily believes that the soul of their daughter is somewhere nearby, and the husband sneers skeptically - the dead have no place in this world, everything otherworldly is no more than the whimsical imagination.
Nicholas Rogue, mechanically copying the main plot moments of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel, shows genuine interest and letter-by-word adherence to the writer’s syllable only in the image of Venice, which acquires in “And Now Don’t Look” the outlines of two different parallel worlds. The city is a reality in which John and Laura roam the swarming streets of tourists and locals, and the city of sleep, in which the heroes wander through the blue blackness of numerous alleys, and only echoes their steps in the wet silence of the canals. With the arrival of night, Venice at Rouge turns into a kind of Necropolis with shabby and sagging walls from dampness, ubiquitous rats climbing from the impenetrable darkness, thawing danger of the gateways. It seems that the British director eventually decided to finally leave the characters to the will of the actors playing them, focusing entirely on metaphors, seeking to fill each scene with symbols of the coming fateful changes. Turning any walk into visual infinity - a new turn follows the turn, another one is visible behind the bridge passed, Rogue charts the path to a sudden ending with the help of peculiar markers. Scarlet scarf, scarlet boots, scarlet cloak, scarlet candle - almost every scene of the film carries the stigma of bloody splashes, laying far from vague suspicions about the finale of the story.
Somewhere in the background, a mysterious maniac cuts up late tourists, but the director, like Du Maurier, gives this information glimpses - a casual conversation, someone's corpse being pulled out of the canal in the background. In "And now ...", despite the appropriate atmosphere, there is no obvious killer, capable of flapping a knife to open the screen canvas, fill the space with the dying moan of his victims. Instead, the story focuses entirely on the Baxters, but this is where the director makes a mistake. Total reflection of the couple, which was in the center of attention of the novel, roughly breaks out of the screen action. All the experiences and internal monologues that made it possible to put together a complete picture of the relationship between John and Laura are replaced by spontaneous improvisations. And all nothing, but the clumsy Donald Sutherland can not establish a convincing contact with Julie Christie, between them there is no necessary chemical reaction, although both try to be closer to each other. Perhaps Rogue knew in advance that he would not be able to create a reliable relationship on the screen of a married couple, so at the last moment he wrote a sensational bed scene into the script. However, protracted eroticism, designed to demonstrate the inseparable emotional and physical connection of the characters, performs its function only within one episode. As soon as the characters leave the hotel room, all their fleeting unity disappears without a trace in the labyrinth of alleys, and bad omens once again come to the fore against the backdrop of the dark shadow of the city.
In the short story of the creator of Rebecca, the circumstances of the death of a little girl were revealed only briefly. Rogue seeks to mechanically expand the boundaries of the literary source. The death of a child in him becomes not only one of the key scenes, it also runs through the whole film in the nurtured symbolism of frames - corpses in the water, a drowned toy-baby, a mysterious figure flashing here and there in the darkness of intricate alleys. As already mentioned, the director is categorically not interested in the experiences of the characters, the emphasis on which Du Maurier did. Instead of them, the command of fate is put at the forefront, manifested in the story only in the denouement. Here it also determines the central vector of the artificially created confrontation: while the rational masculine principle in the person of John, the bishop and the policeman is trying to find a reasonable explanation for what is happening, the female essence in the person of Laura and older sisters does not doubt the existence of the otherworldly. Due to such complications, it seems that the source is added directly on the screen, the timekeeping is stretched with additional episodes, which in theory should make the story more understandable to the viewer unfamiliar with the novel. And this could be considered a good move, if the final chord of the film did not seem as sudden as that of his literary counterpart. After all, in “And now...” the director purposefully leads the viewer through numerous hints to the final twist, while the writer led him to it much more elegantly, distracting the attention of readers to the anxiety of thoughts, which prevailed over the minds of the heroes, forcing them to deny the obvious and follow the lead of the demons of deceptive hope.
In my opinion, to make a film based on the stories of Daphne Dumourier is a difficult matter. First, the director needs to answer questions she always weaves into the plot, for example, Hitchcock’s The Birds were turned inside out not because the director disparaged the original, but because in the original it was a surreal action, giving the reader no answers to the basic questions – why did it happen? Hitchcock turned everything the other way and made the story personal, so it turned out the cult movie.
And secondly, if you answer the questions yourself, it turns out that the work does not correlate well with the source, which was repeatedly reproached by directors, including Daphne herself. It's easier to write your own script.
Third, Du Maurier’s stories or novels are always either metaphorical or fantastic and require the intervention of human imagination. Well, how to film this: a person looks at an apple tree and sees his wife in each branch. And it is really interesting to read, but transferring to the screen is a waste of time.
"Now Don't Look" takes three things, what it can't be blamed for - it's the atmosphere and the bed scene, as well as the natural manner of the actors on the screen. Good production, good editing work, and intense musical accompaniment. In fact, those things made the movie 90 percent. But the plot?! You can scare the viewer as much as you like, and different directors use different tricks for this: someone scares with makeup and special effects, someone with camera work and quick shooting, there are those who simply decide to write “based on real events” and this is enough for them. Nick Rogue decided to take music and an unexpected ending. But the sagging middle can not be hidden anywhere and after viewing it remains unclear what the author wanted to say. Pumping up the atmosphere is good, but this is not all that the viewer needs; I would like to see a simple thriller – I would include something less classical.
The film was somewhat superficial, with each character looking crooked across the screen to confuse us, but as a viewer, I didn’t want to suspect anyone of something that hadn’t happened yet. I was looking for drama, I confess, although I sat down to watch the thriller, it turned out that the beginning set a different tone. I thought it would be an old version of Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman.
A film about life in one city, Venice. This is an ode to him, not a standard admiration, but very atmospheric and realistic, it is difficult to deny the tape.
Nicholas Rogue is one of the most original, original and overrated directors of world cinema. To understand and objectively evaluate one of his best films “And now do not look”, you should say a few words about the creative path and worldview of this man.
Nicholas Rogue showed his unique view of the world in the sixties as an operator, taking part in the creation of more than two dozen paintings. The originality of the young man was so original that some directors refused to work with him at all.
Notable is Roeg's directorial debut. His co-production with Donald Cammell of The Presentation (1968) is, in my opinion, the key to understanding Mr. Roeg’s work. The film of the sixty-eighth year reveals all the components of the future success of the cunning Briton.
In fact, "The Presentation" is a creative manifesto by Nicholas Roeg. A psychedelic parable about interpenetration, the replacement of one person by another. The “psychedelic component” is provided by an excessive number of drug scenes, and the author’s component consists of elements typical of Roeg (and, undoubtedly, exciting him) – sex, surreal visualism, intentional confusion of meanings, false ambiguity, human obsession, attraction to the dark, hidden, incomprehensible.
Nicholas Rogue is a representative of the cohort of authors for whom form is more important than content. These people tend to be talented manipulators, often provocateurs, and always interesting storytellers. The ability to tell a story well is a great talent and an indispensable component of the success of any work. It does not matter what to talk about, much more important how to talk. The correctness of this formula has been proven many times.
Returning to the painting “Don’t Look Now.” If you ask to retell the plot of the novella Daphne Dumourier, based on which the film was made, everything will be limited to one sentence about the tragic death of a little girl and the reflections of parents about this tragedy. But if you ask to retell the essence of Rogue's painting, the monologue of the respondent can last for hours. Moreover, the lion’s share will be occupied by the story of the “baroque image of Venice”, amazing stylization, atmosphere and music, associations and reminiscences, personal sensations, assumptions, ideas, etc. That is, in fact, people will talk about their personal reading of the film. That's exactly what Rogue wanted. This is what art is called when it is inspired and sincere. The picture of Roeg, in my opinion, is artificially twisted.
I don't appreciate the movie. I dislike the significant emptiness of the film, the deliberate inflaming of infernal fear, imitation of mysticism. I am saddened by the dwarveness of evil deeds. After watching it, it feels like the film is smaller and simpler than it seems. I am not against manipulating the audience. But I am offended and unacceptable when a manipulator holds the viewer for a simpleton.
The undoubted advantages of the picture are acting, music by Pino Donagio and winter Venice. I have never seen Venice like this before!
Finally, a few words about Roeg. Despite a truly original, amazing talent, Rogue-director ended up as he should have ended - audience oblivion. Only a few aesthetic film lovers will be able to remember the noteworthy work of the director. And the nineties for Mr. Roeg, in terms of creativity, are generally catastrophic. The director closed himself in open eroticism, perverted mysticism, got lost in some hypertrophied-complex forms of nonsense and... just tired of all his monotonous-obsolete manner.
You need to leave on time and beautifully.
7 out of 10
Our trouble is that we do not want to understand that God, besides our works, can have some of his own, no less important deeds.
The film by Nicholas Rouge based on the novella by Daphne Dumourier “And now do not look.”
Let’s note at once this is a very difficult film. The thriller in the mystical component of which a deep psychological drama is hidden.
There is nothing wrong with John and Laura Baxter. And like thunder in the clear sky, the tragic death of his daughter. It seems that life, just recently the happy couple stopped, lost meaning. But time gradually erases the pain of our losses and after Laura's treatment in a psychiatric hospital, the family goes to Florence, where John is hired to restore the church of San Nicolo dei Mendicoli. Where the place to leave all the sorrows in the past is also not so simple. There is an elusive serial killer operating in the city, and Laura meets two sisters Heather and Wendy, one of whom is a medium and claims to have seen her daughter. Laura of the last strength grasps at this flimsy straw, between her happy past and the joyless present.
Next, I will omit criticisms about mysticism and thriller, much has been said about this, and I will dwell on the psychological component of this story.
Our life, even in a state of permanent happiness, often makes us think about its meaning. Not so much the meaning of life as the meaning of life. Yes, we listen carefully to what parents, teachers, just acquaintances and strangers teach us. We grow up, make business plans, raise children and seem to get some kind of logical system, albeit not quite harmonious. We begin to understand, often through children, what love is and why it is for us. We learn not to take, but to give. We begin to feel our happiness inextricably with the happiness of people close to us.
And all of a sudden, this whole pyramid collapses with the ridiculous death of a loved one. What now? Who will help, who will just understand the heartache, friends?, neighbors?, country?, God?
You may have another child, but that won't solve the problem, because it can never replace the one that's gone. And you can also, like the hero of the film, go to work, which also will not solve the problem, because the issues are fundamentally different.
I do not want to agree with the director, but everything is so thoroughly and thoroughly disassembled on the shelves that the tragic outcome seems to be the only possible way out of the created life situation.
Horror as a separate genre of cinema has always been. He grew up, mutated, mimicked the surrounding reality, overgrown with new directions, acquired international features and narrowed to a purely national color, but did not disappear, only sometimes gave way to the first plan to more relevant at a certain point in history, with the indulgence of his older brother going into the shadows. However, in the seventies of the 20th century, something hitherto unprecedented happened: the merger of horror, one of the most spectacular, and therefore mainstream genres, with authorial cinema, designed primarily for an intellectual audience. One after another, tense, ambiguous pictures began to appear on screens around the world, including the USSR, striking with depth, visual perfection and controversial interpretations. “Picnic at the Hanging Rock”, “Rosemary’s Child”, “Omen”, “Exorcist”, “Eraser Head”, “Bloody-Red”, the same “Solaris” by Tarkovsky and Kubrikov’s “Shining” (although the film was released in 1980, the director began shooting two years earlier) – the number of action-packed, uncomfortable, mystical, bloody masterpieces grew and multiplied, they forever inscribed their names in archin letters in the history of world cinema. Now horror has ceased to be just a second violin, seasoning to the plot. The strange thing happened: the plot, as such, has become almost unimportant. Dramaturgy faded into the background, giving way to atmosphericity, attention was concentrated on the subjective, reality definitely slipped away, and no one cared about it. From now on, the sober “why” did not matter, only the incomprehensible “how” remained.
“And now do not look” one of these pictures, her world, frightening from the first frames, is visual and tactile, and at the same time ephemeral, like a bad dream, like the most terrible, painful gloom. On the surface is the story of parents who lost their daughter in a stupid accident. To forget and move away from the grief, they go to Venice, where her husband is waiting for the work of a restorer. In the course of certain events, both begin to feel that their daughter is still alive or at least somehow trying to contact them. However, very soon the plot dissolves into a hypnotic obsession, and Venice, the most romantic and fabulous city on earth, removes the carnival mask, exposing a dense, breathing and pressing emptiness, and peers into the viewer with the blind but steadfast eyes of the old soothsayer, you cannot escape from such a look, you cannot hide. A dead season in a slowly sinking, dying city; a trapping yawn of labyrinths of narrow streets and tunnels along which heroes rush in a pendulum search... Rational grain faces an irrational abyss and loses dry.
Tlen is everywhere, the city is decaying, the old church, the restoration of which is engaged in the father of the deceased child, falls to pieces, the world around still retains its external appeal, but this beauty, like a feverish blush on the face of a dying person, is clearly not for long. There is water everywhere, it oozes from all the crevices, murmurs in the womb under the graceful bridges, and something is lurking, waiting for its time, something ancient, much older than this city, its sacred places, perhaps even older than Christianity itself. Is this not why a respectable bishop wakes up in sweat in the middle of the night and at the slightest rustle grasps the crucifix hanging around his neck? Sometimes it even seems that he is afraid to go into the cathedral. The highest clergyman, who should abstain from all foolish superstitions, seems to realize that no prayer can save him from the omnipresent original evil to which this place originally belonged and belongs.
Parents at first are excluded from what is happening, they do not care about the outside world, because they are fixated on their own trouble, and therefore seek comfort in each other. Inspired by sudden hope, the two try to mend the relationship, so one of the central places in the film is a rather long and frank erotic scene, when the main characters John and Laura first have sex after the death of their daughter. Still, this episode, filmed under the gentle shimmering of Pino Donagio's keyboards, has more quiet despair than passion. Their sex is a kind of prelude to death. Eros, behind whom looms the shadow of Thanatos.
The whole melody of the film is woven from the muttering of such shadows creeping from everywhere, the echo of someone’s booming steps, the noise of the wings of disturbed pigeons, the incessant splash of water, sharp laughter, shrillly exploding dead silence.
Long review plans suddenly focus on some absolutely irrelevant to the plot detail: whether it is a bright brooch of a strange shape or a crumbling mosaic with the face of Jesus, photos of some stranger children on the nightstand of an old maid, the strange looks of a police inspector and a doodle, which he unaccountably draws on a piece of paper. In almost every twilight frame, a juicy splash of red, the color in which a particular object is painted, attracts the eye: a crimson candle at the icon, purple shoes of a cute old woman, scarlet wine in glasses. What's all this about? Uncertainty and discomfort are becoming more and more palpable, a powerful image system suppresses all logic and gradually, on semitones, a vision of absolute evil, unnamed and infinite, is built.
The oozing water is concentrated into thick, pulsating, salty blood, spilled over a lubricated photograph. It flows through the frames, through the images, through the notes and asks more and more insistently to come out.
There's no special effects here. No mountain of corpses, no gallons of blood, no monsters jumping out of the corner. There is nothing that should accompany an ordinary horror movie.
However, the film is terrifying. At first, everything seems boring and incoherent. Every moment hints: now it will be scary! But -- no big deal. And again, here we go!
At the end of the film, it really gets scary. For all the past moments, he's twitching. Increasingly.
It's impossible to get away from this movie. It is impossible not to worry about heroes. Yeah, it's weirdly shot, it kind of looks like some crazy art house. Every time he whispers, don’t look, don’t look now. But you're looking.
I fell asleep thinking about the story and woke up with them. There is no special semantic load of the film does not carry - it simply reflects many pieces of emotion.
'If you look into the abyss for a long time, the abyss will begin to peer into you'.
I think the film can be summed up in this quote.
Worth watching. It will be incomprehensible, creepy, for someone nightmare. It all depends on a person’s perception of the world, on emotionality.
Please note that in the review, references and references to the features and twists of the storyline are possible.
Venice can be sparkling, alluring, native, as Fellini draws it in Casanova; in Death in Venice, Visconti, the Pearl of the Seas gives the last revelation, a bright flash before eternal rest; Venice Rouga is cold, hostile, oppressive. But for all the above directors, it is bright, memorable, incomparable, irreplaceable.
The film, which began as a family drama, ended as a mystical thriller. And somewhere in the middle there were long dialogues, which later proved to be iconic, walks through the winter and inhospitable city, mysterious murders that do not come to the fore until the last, mysterious strangers, each of whom looks suspicious at least, predictions told by the confident voice of a blind woman, so terrible and rapidly coming true, alarming music and an increasingly oppressive atmosphere, increasingly decisive and, I would even say, irrevocably leading to the end.
The dance with death is over, but who started this dance when the main characters entered it, who hides under masks at this masquerade ball (we do not forget that this is Venice), how their role is defined, whether this is really the end, who is the conductor, who controls the invisible orchestra, what are the guises of Laura and John (Volto or Bauta, but the character of Donald Sutherland seems to me exclusively with the long nose of the Plague Doctor, however, powerless to resist the disease of a dying city). Rogue doesn’t answer questions, he asks them, very masterfully, paying special attention to the visual part, which in this film is one of the most memorable, and it is also frightening. A lot. This cute character will long be seen in empty streets, in unlit corners and even looking out from behind the bedroom doorway.
Nicholas Roeg's film ' Now Don't Look' was released in 1973. The genre of this film is defined as horror, thriller, detective. Well, the detective here does not smell, because the detective suspects the presence of a very specific crime, a very specific corpse and a very specific killer in the end, and everything is flavored with the logic of some brilliant detective. Thriller... yes, perhaps in this film there is something from the thriller, at least it keeps in suspense and in the end develops quite rapidly. Horror... I think ' And now don't look' it's quite possible to call a horror movie, but not like the endless stamped stories about zombies or dismemberment in the style ' Destination 1, 2, 3... n'. This film is frightening after the finale, when I saw everything and found out everything. There are no scary pictures (although a man with a slit throat twitches naturally, yes..) or terrible revelations, just the film is gloomy, you can say Gothic, and the background for the events are the views of Venice. Not a classic romantic paradise on the water, but a gloomy, damp, dilapidated place where you can easily get lost or hear women's dying screams from a nearby neighborhood. Perhaps not the best place to relax after such a mental trauma experienced by the main characters.
They lost their daughter. She drowned outside their house. And the strangest thing is that this did not cause discord between the spouses or mutual accusations (which is different from the standard plots). They move to Venice, and while Donald Sutherland restores the cathedral, cute Julie Christie spends time in the company of two questionable old women, one of whom is not only blind, but also a medium who conveys words to a poor woman from her deceased daughter. Again, which is strange: unlike most films with similar events, here the heroine only feels relief and happiness from contact with her daughter and is not going to attack old women with accusations of bullying and extortion. The husband, too, at first did not care much about the new passion of his wife, but then begins to sincerely worry about her mental health. Rogue said he inserted an erotic scene into the film so that the viewer did not think that the couple were only doing what they were fighting, but, frankly, I was already surprised how harmonious and peaceful their relationship was in this situation. But the erotic scene, in my opinion, was absolutely nothing. Not to say that not to the place, but without it it was quite possible to do.
If I continue to write in the same spirit, then I risk retelling the film, which in any case can not be done. I'll just say it's going faster towards the final, and the finale is interesting, but not super original or confusing. And I can't help feeling like the nasty old ladies are involved in something - I've probably seen too many movies with the old ladies from Hell, and now I can't stop. In the film, we see the typical style of Roeg: for example, how wine pours from the table when Lauren faints in a restaurant. I liked the frankly unnatural look of blood, both on the slide and from the slit throat.
As for the acting, I can not notice anything, everything looked natural and to the place, Donald Sutherland, as it was noticed, played a great father in whose arms his own daughter died, his screaming and skating on the ground with his legs upside down ... in the description sounds funny, but in fact, it looked really dramatic.
Regarding this film as a whole, I can say: I do not think that it contains any deep idea or is intended to read morality to all mankind, but it has an interesting plot, an interesting ending, as well as a perfectly depicted atmosphere of despondency, dirty city and danger, and beautiful views of Venice are accompanied by no less beautiful music, so that especially fastidious can get at least aesthetic pleasure. I liked the film rather than not, because I am close, if I may say so, ' Gothic sadness' It's not exactly sad, not too gothic, but something very close.