Dark Eyes Retrovision #18: Don't Look Now (UK 1973: Dir Nicolas Roeg)

Nic Roeg's 1973 film, just a few years shy of its 50th anniversary, is these days popularly seen as a) the most straightforward of the director's features and b) a pivotal film in marking the transition of British cinema from its more linear storytelling roots to something temporally experimental, aligning its narrative more to the psychology of memory than to the accepted beginning-middle-end story format.

Studiocanal's 4K and Ultra HD restoration of Don't Look Now is a chance to re-evaluate a movie which, since its initial theatrical release (poorly publicised and put out on a double bill with a rather truncated early version of The Wicker Man), has slowly gained in critical stature, and which now regularly features in 'Best of' British' film lists.

Adapted from a short story by Daphne Du Maurier published in 1971, Roeg's film, from a script by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, opens out the original text considerably, using it as a jumping off point for a complex narrative and visual story where the supernatural is often glimpsed but never fully brought into focus, and whose themes are suffused in a masterclass of interlocking edits.

John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) have travelled to Venice following an appalling tragedy whereby their daughter Christine has drowned in a pond outside their English country home. John has been asked to oversee the rebuilding of one of the City's churches, and the couple hope that the change of scene will help them overcome their grief. Laura's chance meeting with a pair of English women, one of whom is a blind psychic, sows the seeds of a belief that Christine is still with her parents in spirit: John, initially sceptical of this revelation, questions his own lack of faith when he glimpses a small figure, dressed in a red raincoat (similar to the outfit that Christine was wearing when she drowned) walking at a distance in the Venetian alleyways. Against a backdrop of a series of murders in the city, and the subsequent attentions of the police who believe that John could be a suspect, he continues to track down the mysterious figure and in turn presages his own doom.

Watching the movie after a gap of quite a few years, what's even more apparent now is the whiff (actually more than that) of Oedipal Greek tragedy to the piece, with its almost inevitable conclusion, and its causative circularity of events drawing the central male character to his own fate. From the opening scene, with John poring over slides of the church he is to renovate and seeing (or not seeing) a hooded red figure sitting in one of the pews, his destiny is set. The ending may seem a little jarring in relation to the lyrical tone of the rest of the film, but Roeg was no stranger to such juxtapositions: the suicide of the father and the death of the indigenous young man in Walkabout (1970); Newton's reveal of his alien self in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976); or the witches peeling off their human coverings in his adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches (1990).

In one of the disc's extras, it's learned that Roeg and Anthony Richmond, Don't Look Now's director of photography, roomed together during the making of the film, and talked of little else during their stay. This close relationship plays out in the harmony of narrative and visuals, the camera adopting an almost reportage-y style, picking out incidences of everyday Venetian life that Sutherland, in his role of John Baxter, would have glimpsed through his constantly darting eyes, as if always just sensing something out of the corner of his vision.

Sutherland and Christie are of course perfect in their roles, a contrast of characters and belief systems, united in grief and brought together as much by the hope engendered by the psychic as the city itself, whose decaying beauty frames the couple's air of tragedy. Don't Look Now may be a film more to admire than love (and maybe that's just me) but it's as jarring today as on first release, and well worth another view in this superb restoration.

Don't Look Now is out on 29 July 2019. Extras include an audio commentary with Nicolas Roeg, two new documentaries on the history of the film and its colour palette, and a host of interviews from a previous release of the movie including composer Pino Donaggio, screenwriter/producer Allan Scott, director of cinematography Tony Richmond and Donald Sutherland.

Performance (UK 1970 Dir Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg)

At the start of 2018 I thought I'd reproduce some viewing notes that I wrote for screenings at my
local film club over the past couple of years, kicking off with Performance. 

Performance is a movie thoroughly deserving of that rather over-used term ‘cult status.’ Filmed in 1968, it was shelved for two years before finally being released – with cuts – to a public unused to such transgressive goings-on in a British flick, and greeting it with little more than mild disinterest. Two decades of frequent showings on the club circuits built up a steady fan base, leading to the film now regularly being included in ‘20 top British film’ lists. Whether it deserves that accolade is a matter for debate, but its enduring fascination is more than nostalgia for a London of the past – it was one of the first films, British or otherwise, to explicitly flirt with gender identity and its blurred boundaries. Filled with druggy details and a certain soupcon of polymorphous perversity, it’s a movie the UK certainly wasn’t ready for in 1970.

The question of identity extends beyond the story of the film, which sees heavy for hire Chas (played by James Fox) on the run from a killing, moving himself into, and ‘turning on’ at the Notting Hill home of ‘retired’ rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) and his two muses, played by Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton.   

The distinction between real life and film was blurred in the casting - Jagger and Pallenberg may possibly have been an item at the point of filming, and the latter had already been associated with other members of The Rolling Stones. James Fox was at the time going out with an androgynous girl called Andee, who is suspiciously similar to the slight Ms Breton, with whom Chas has a relationship. Jagger’s former girlfriend Marianne Faithfull goes further in the ‘art imitating life’ debate, citing  a wild druggy evening with Jagger, James Fox and Andee as the inspiration for part of the film, a detail picked up by Donald Cammell and expanded into a full length movie script, originally titled ‘The Liars’. 

And one cannot forget the spectre of Brian Jones, the Stones member who, very like Turner in the film, had rejected his band and opted for a life of drug-fuelled self-reflection. As Bill Wyman said, again echoing the Turner character, “he was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it – highly intelligent – and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away.” Tragically Jones would die between the filming of Performance and its cinema release.

People often cite Performance as Nic Roeg’s first directing role, which it was, but it was also co-helmed by Donald Cammell. Cammell came from a wealthy background, which funded his travels around the world, freely indulging his talent as an artist and moving in the circles of the great and the good. In 1967 he ended up in Paris, where via producer Sanford Lieberson he was paired with Nicolas Roeg, a jobbing cinematographer, to produce the final flick – rumour has it that Marlon Brando, a friend of Cammell’s, was first approached for the James Fox role. And although it’s what would now be seen as a typically Roeg film – all sharp edits and strange point of view shooting  - there is a question about how much of Performance’s look and louche transgressive feel actually came from Cammell’s first-hand experience of the excesses of the ‘swinging sixties.’