Don’t Look Now is
an unsettling film. Primarily it is a visual narrative disturbed by images,
repeated motifs, ideas and themes, presented out of order but centred around a
tragedy, which only delivers its full influence and meaning in the film’s
closing moments. Nicolas Roeg himself referred to Don’t Look Now as
an “exercise in film grammar” and this film is structured visually to express a
greater meaning, beyond the dialogue and the theatrics, continually hinting at
an awaiting fate, tied up with the influence of the past, but also locked into
a predetermined future, which was always there from the very beginning.
The
film is full of symbolic portents, reflecting the time that has passed, the
time that is now and the time to come. Water, glass, mirrors, transparencies
and film itself becomes the medium through which things are revealed and also
hidden, sometimes appearing as a window and other times a murky barrier between
the physical realm and the subconscious, to show a world where “God has other
priorities.” The colour red appears as a warning, a sporadic signal growing
ever more frequent and the child’s toys, church mosaics, gargoyle faces,
concealed furniture and broken glass are objects all laden with damning
significance. Even the slide image John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) plays with
at start of the film visually encapsulates the symbolic ordering of the coming
narrative, one that looks at the past, the present and the future within a
single frame, with the red on the transparency, the water, the hooded figure,
the church, and the wash of colour that mimics a map of Venice, seen later in
the movie.
Like
most of Roeg’s work this is a film about seeing and non-seeing and knowing and
unknowing. John Baxter may have the gift of second-sight but he is blind to its
suggestions and denies its influence. In contrast, the psychic woman who
accepts her gift is physically blind. Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) believes
but doesn’t see, the bishop believes but wishes he didn’t have to, the
inspector fails to see the faces of living and only sees the dead. The audience
sees all (in the absence of God) but only knows the significance of this seeing
when John Baxter, in his final scene, replays a stream of images in his head,
when film's grammar is exercised fully in one elliptical arc and the final
imagistic structure is complete, when the past future and present finally
coalesce and everything that has been seen reveals its significance.
