745 Don't Look Now

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Jean-Luc Garbo
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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#26 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Thu Jan 22, 2015 11:23 pm


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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#27 Post by AnamorphicWidescreen » Sun Jan 25, 2015 3:52 am

Recently saw Don't Look Now for the very first time, and am extremely impressed! Prior to seeing this I hadn't realized that it was essentially an atmospheric horror movie....quite horrific & creepy.

Never been to Venice, but DLN (along with Paul Schrader's underrated & disturbing 1990 film The Comfort of Strangers) truly paints a menacing portrait of this picturesque city. It seems that potential danger waits around every corner...

Though the whole film was amazing, my favorite scenes were towards the end,
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when the D. Sutherland character was running through the streets chasing the small figure with the red parka because he thought she was his late daughter - When he finally confronted this figure and she turned around, the visage of the elderly dwarf with the knife was truly bizzare & creepy - you knew he was dead at that point...the implication here was that this dwarf was the one who was picking people off, re: the body that was fished out of the canal - quite grotesque...
Was also truly creeped out by
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Sutherland seeing his wife & the two elderly woman on the boat, who ignored them when he called after them...when he found out his wife was in the UK at the time, it was quite puzzling...until the end, when you realized he was seeing the near future - the three were on a boat ride to attend his funeral...

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#28 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Feb 27, 2015 7:47 pm


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Lost Highway
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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#29 Post by Lost Highway » Tue Mar 03, 2015 3:59 pm

AnamorphicWidescreen wrote: Though the whole film was amazing, my favorite scenes were towards the end,
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when the D. Sutherland character was running through the streets chasing the small figure with the red parka because he thought she was his late daughter - When he finally confronted this figure and she turned around, the visage of the elderly dwarf with the knife was truly bizzare & creepy - you knew he was dead at that point...the implication here was that this dwarf was the one who was picking people off, re: the body that was fished out of the canal - quite grotesque...
You've mostly got it right, though...
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I would argue that Sutherland doesn't think that the small figure in the red coat is his daughter. He is drawn to the figure because she reminds him of his daughter. He falls for the serial killer's ploy, which is to pretend that she is a vulnerable child, to lure her victims to a secluded spot. Throughout the entire film he has been a firm rationalist, which is his downfall, because it means he wasn't sensitive to the fact that he had psychic abilities, so for him to think that he is seeing a ghost even at this point, wouldn't make sense.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#30 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Mar 03, 2015 5:27 pm

I think at a certain point, whether you 'believe' or not, you just want to know, whatever the cost.
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I like the way the daughter and her red coat since the opening of the film has been associated with death, just as the lake in which she drowned in some senses is linked with the waterlogged Venice itself.

Perhaps the most devastating aspect of the ending isn't just the shocking twist but that John's concrete need to know turns him away from the support of Laura, who has found solace with more intangible and unquestioned comforts of the afterlife, and even devastatingly causes him to abandon her. While Laura's intangible faith provides her with the comfort and strength to go on living after a devastating loss (and likely will again), John gets his concrete answer to his visions, but it comes to seem more like a death wish.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Tue Mar 03, 2015 5:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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tenia
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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#31 Post by tenia » Tue Mar 03, 2015 5:29 pm

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I too think John knows is not running after his daughter but is more likely curious as to who is this so-ressembling figure running around in Venice.
On the other end, it's also interesting to see how HE is the one not being able to go through the death of his daughter. See how he speaks to the Italian official about his wife. It seems almost as he thinks it's abnormal of her being able to overcome the grief and being happy again.

So he's chasing instead a grotesque memory even if this brings him to his death.

That's why I haven't found the ending scary at end, but rather very sad.
EDIT : kind of beated by colin.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#32 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Mar 03, 2015 6:47 pm

colinr0380 wrote:I think at a certain point, whether you 'believe' or not, you just want to know, whatever the cost.
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I like the way the daughter and her red coat since the opening of the film has been associated with death, just as the lake in which she drowned in some senses is linked with the waterlogged Venice itself.

Perhaps the most devastating aspect of the ending isn't just the shocking twist but that John's concrete need to know turns him away from the support of Laura, who has found solace with more intangible and unquestioned comforts of the afterlife, and even devastatingly causes him to abandon her. While Laura's intangible faith provides her with the comfort and strength to go on living after a devastating loss (and likely will again), John gets his concrete answer to his visions, but it comes to seem more like a death wish.
My favourite wrinkle in all this (and one of the few outright turns into the irrational in the film) is:
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in the scene where the daughter drowns, it's apparent that John's slides of Venice contain a shot of the dwarf in her red raincoat, her presence looming over him and his personal tragedies from the beginning.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#33 Post by Highway 61 » Tue Mar 03, 2015 8:42 pm

AnamorphicWidescreen wrote:Never been to Venice, but DLN (along with Paul Schrader's underrated & disturbing 1990 film The Comfort of Strangers) truly paints a menacing portrait of this picturesque city. It seems that potential danger waits around every corner...
One of the most remarkable things about Venice is how dark and quiet it is at night. Although the city is depressingly (even dangerously) overcrowded with tourists everyday of the year, it is unlike another any other urban environment in the world because of the total absence of cars and the street lamps necessary for night driving. Even the major thoroughfare of the city, the grand canal, is eerily silent and somber at night. Other Italian cities, like Florence and Turin, have recently closed their centers to most automative traffic, but the conventional rows of parallel street lamps are still there, so the effect is a liberating, safe feeling in which pedestrians can walk in the middle of wide, open roads and enjoy the city without being on alert. Venice is totally different. The isolation is palpable—again, despite the tourists.

Roeg wonderfully captures this sensation in the dark finale of Don't Look Now. He also appears to have made a point of filming the city on gray, cloudy days, in contrast to, say, The Talented Mr. Ripley or Casino Royale. It all adds up to an appropriately gloomy atmosphere.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#34 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Mar 03, 2015 9:35 pm

We should also add to the sense of 'danger lurking around every corner' in Venice any adaptation of Othello (ideally the Orson Welles version!) and the palpable threat of disease in Death In Venice! And a great giallo from almost the same time as Don't Look Now that is also set in Venice is Who Saw Her Die?

It all makes Katherine Hepburn taking a headlong plunge into the canal in Summertime seem tame by comparison!

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#35 Post by oh yeah » Wed Mar 04, 2015 12:57 am

For me one of the creepiest scenes in the film is an earlier one where Laura and John get lost in Venice, at night. Really, all the night scenes in particular have this aura of sheer dread and menace. I think Don't Look Now is potentially the most genuinely "scary" I've seen, actually; the first time I saw it it just had the most incredibly powerful and haunting effect on me. I couldn't stop thinking about it for months. While it's not quite like that anymore, I still love the film and find it extremely devastating to watch -- once every year or two, tops, is good enough for me. After this one, there's quite a drop-off in quality in terms of Roeg, I think; as much as I love The Man Who Fell to Earth's sheer weirdness and visual clarity, none of his other films have such a strong effect on me as DLN. (I never quite got the love for Walkabout, though I do like it).

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#36 Post by Lost Highway » Wed Mar 04, 2015 6:20 am

Don't Look Now is up there among my ten favourite films, but I too have problems relating to much of Roeg's other work. The co-directed Performance was a great start, with the exception of its preachy ending I love Walkabout and I like the first half of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Most of his following work, with the possible exception of the atypical The Witches, feels inaccessible to me.

I'm a great fan of Richard Lester's starkly modernist Petulia on which Roeg was the cinematographer and on which he appears to have had a great amount of creative influence. With its non-chronological editing rhythms and its focus on disastrously unravelling relationships, it feels more like the first Nicolas Roeg film than anything else Lester did. Like a screwball comedy played for tragedy, it now looks like a companion piece to Bad Timing.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#37 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Mar 08, 2015 12:10 pm

By the way, perhaps the nearest any film has yet come to 'remaking' Don't Look Now would be Vinyan. That linked trailer is spoilerific but is the nearest acceptable footage from the film on YouTube at the moment. It is also quite misleading of the final film with the trailer full of flashy cuts and heavy narrative focus compared to Vinyan itself which is full of long takes and dialogue drowned out or half-heard.

I'll copy something I wrote up about Vinyan below. Eventually it doesn't reach the same heights as Don't Look Now, but it is fascinating to watch with Roeg's film in mind:
My old review of Vinyan wrote:Major spoilers for Vinyan:

An amazing mood piece of a film in which the whisper thin (even irritating if you want characters to behave rationally) plot is constantly overwhelmed by stunning imagery, from abstract tsunami title sequence to disturbingly bizarre conclusion.

This film involves a couple who have lost a child in a tsunami in Thailand. When they go to a swanky fund-raising cocktail party the mother played by Emmanuelle Beart thinks that she sees her son in a campaign video. We see the video too: it is a grainy long shot of a boy with his back to us wearing a Manchester United shirt walking away from the camera.

With this shaky evidence the couple get involved with the local Triad boss to arrange to be smuggled into Burma. What follows is the usual 'foreigners abroad' mix of the European couple getting exploited and fleeced of their money, having children paraded in front of theim as their lost son, and the couple themselves fighting with each other as the mother seems laser focused on her mission while the father tags along telling her that it is completely crazy.

There is an amazing sequence just before the couple set out on their journey of the father watching the campaign video in slow motion, almost as if he is trying to get onto his wife's wavelength of being so certain that it is their son. The footage from the grainy silent video then eerily morphs into a boy with his back to the camera walking down what was a bustling, now silent market street lit with the same dark red light of the strip club the couple arranged their boat trip at, then into the also empty club where the wife met the Triad boss. The wife is there, in the arena where the strippers dance. The boy watches her, then reaches out to her as it begins to rain indoors. Then we cut back to reality and they are off on their journey.

That kind of impressive visually gorgeous and eerie imagery is layered on throughout the film, although that sequence is the most beautifully abstract and disturbing one.
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Eventually we reach the heart of the forest and find a tribe of feral cannibal children for the devastating climax as one member of the couple meets their doom and the other gets entirely what they want (or retreats into insanity, depending on your point of view!)
That craziness is at the heart of the film and eventually it becomes less about the son than about the breakdown of the couple. Perhaps its closest companion piece would be Don't Look Now, although this film is a lot more enigmatic (almost willfully obtuse) and frustrating than the Roeg film. Don't go into this one looking for characters to behave with any sense of self-preservation (they don't!), but instead for the spectacular imagery and its strange take on obsessive motherhood in the face of loss.

Perhaps the biggest lesson this film taught me is that you shouldn't assume that a mass produced Manchester United football shirt automatically makes someone look like your son!

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#38 Post by Lost Highway » Sun Mar 08, 2015 2:05 pm

I think that rather than Don't Look Now, the closest companion piece to Vinyan is Von Trier's Antichrist, down to the hostile/magical forest setting and the wife...
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...going insane, being responsible for her husband's gruesome death and in the end becoming part of the forest herself.
Last edited by Lost Highway on Thu Mar 12, 2015 12:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#39 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Mar 08, 2015 2:09 pm

I think that Don't Look Now is more of a reference, especially since Fabrice du Welz's earlier film Calvaire is also a remake/reinterpretation of The Wicker Man, so he knows his classic 70s horror cinema, but yes Antichrist makes a good comparison too, along with something like John Boorman's Emerald Forest! :D (Antichrist came out a little later than Vinyan, but there must have been some anti-nature sentiments in the air at the time!)

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Lost Highway
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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#40 Post by Lost Highway » Sun Mar 08, 2015 2:29 pm

I remember seeing Antichrist and Vinyan within a few months of each other and I thought they almost were the same story. It could well be that du Welz was influenced by Don't Look Now, but in terms of plot it's the inverse of Vinyan.

I was a little disappointed in Vinyan after the excellent Calvaire, which by the way I also don't think is as close (certainly not remake close) to The Wicker Man as you claim. It shares just as much DNA with Polanski's The Tenant and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#41 Post by HerrSchreck » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:26 pm


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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#42 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:50 pm

Hostile magical forest? --- how does Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Charisma (1999) fit into the mix?

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#43 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Mar 09, 2015 8:59 pm

Lost Highway wrote:I remember seeing Antichrist and Vinyan within a few months of each other and I thought they almost were the same story. It could well be that du Welz was influenced by Don't Look Now, but in terms of plot it's the inverse of Vinyan.

I was a little disappointed in Vinyan after the excellent Calvaire, which by the way I also don't think is as close (certainly not remake close) to The Wicker Man as you claim. It shares just as much DNA with Polanski's The Tenant and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I do agree with you on this. The dynamics of the couple are totally different in Vinyan compared to Don't Look Now, but there is an eerie sense of similar lost of child and rushing towards a kind of self-created end to both of the films. And Antichrist too, now that you mention it!

I also agree that it is arguable that any of Fabrice du Welz's films could be considered official 'remakes', yet I'd much rather see films adapting and manipulating existing tropes into new, original forms than there being a redundant and more obvious remake of the same. Going off on a tangent (and also back into the Psycho remake discussion we had a while back), I also think that not being an exact remake allows the space for identifying similar ideas and making connections between disparate films which perhaps gets to the heart of the purpose of and joy of being a film critic, or anyone with an interest in film really. (Perhaps this is why remake culture, even more than sequel culture, has seemingly coincided with the 'death of the critic', as analysis, at least on the superficial level, comes to seem redundant when the material is being recycled. I've found that there are some interesting 'remakes', but they are often the ones that make some drastic changes to their source material rather than just replaying the same film with new actors or in colour, or so on. So I much prefer 'in the tradition of' films!). In a way film criticism eventually gets beyond just judging and reviewing a specific film on its individual strengths or weaknesses, but also into what a particular film has added to the wider language of cinema, or what new wrinkle or different perspective it has added to familiar existing themes.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#44 Post by Lost Highway » Thu Mar 12, 2015 12:25 pm

There is something I like to call "variations on a theme" rather than a remake. That's a film which isn't a remake but one which toys with ones familiarity with another film. As a fervent Brian De Palma apologist I always get irritated when people refer to Obsession as a remake of Vertigo (and to De Palma as someone who just rips off Hitchcock). Too many details are different and the plot twist is the opposite of Vertigo, even if both films deal with similar themes of doubles, transgressive sexuality, misogyny and romantic obsession. De Palma takes Hitchcock's films apart and them reassembles them in a different way, like the neighbours kid in Toy Story who takes toys apart and then reassembles them as mutant toys (he's made out to be the villain, but I think he's a most imaginative and creative kid).

I'm not in the camp of people who hate Van Sant's Psycho remake but I think the way De Palma riffs on Psycho in Dressed to Kill is far more fun. It closely follows the structure of Psycho and nearly every main character has an equivalent in Dressed to Kill, yet everything is reconfigured and De Palma's delirious, baroque style is the complete opposite of Hitchcock's cool modernism.

BTW. for those who find my grammar and vocabulary strange (Michael Kerpan !), my first language isn't English. I'm doing my best. :)
Last edited by Lost Highway on Thu Mar 12, 2015 3:43 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#45 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Mar 12, 2015 1:15 pm

Lost Highway wrote:BTW. for those who find my grammar and vocabulary strange (Michael Kerpan !), my first language isn't English. I'm doing my best. :)
I don't remember teasing you over this. But I apologize, in any event.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#46 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Mar 12, 2015 2:30 pm

I'm with you on preferring 'variations on a theme' to outright 'remakes' Lost Highway! (And the preference for Dressed To Kill over the Psycho remake)

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#47 Post by Dark Horse 77 » Sat Mar 21, 2015 8:27 am

A question about the first supplement on disc 2 entitled Don't Look Back: Looking Back:

I watched it the other night and there is no color for the 20 minute documentary. Is this a stylistic decision or could it be a defect?

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#48 Post by Roger Ryan » Thu Mar 26, 2015 7:56 am

Dark Horse 77 wrote:A question about the first supplement on disc 2 entitled Don't Look Back: Looking Back:

I watched it the other night and there is no color for the 20 minute documentary. Is this a stylistic decision or could it be a defect?
Actually, there is a bit of color...the color red (note the appearance of the figure in the red raincoat sitting in the church pew behind the right shoulder of Nicolas Roeg during his interview segments). At one point in the interview, Roeg notes that they made a conscious effort to eliminate other colors during the shots of the figure in the red raincoat to emphasize the coat. I believe the producers of the documentary took that idea to heart and electronically drained all of the color from the program apart from the objects colored red. That this appears to have affected the film clips as well demonstrates that not a lot of care was taken in this stylistic choice. It also doesn't help that the documentary looks like it was produced in standard definition and the interlaced transfer used on the Criterion disc is weak.

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Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#49 Post by domino harvey » Tue Apr 28, 2015 5:10 pm


criterion10

Re: 745 Don't Look Now

#50 Post by criterion10 » Tue Apr 28, 2015 11:31 pm

In related news, there is no God.

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