Don't Look Now [VHS] [1973]

A couple, bereaved after their daughter's death, stay awhile in wintry Venice. Two elderly sisters claim to be in contact with the dead girl, but are they telling the truth, or are they con artists? Add to this a series of strange events and a murderer terrorising the city...

This could have been (and indeed sounds like) a cheap horror flick. The reason "Don't Look Now" is a classic (an overused word, but true in this case) is that we care about the Baxters. Sutherland and Christie are thoroughly believable, especially when they have lines about the occult that could easily be corny. The same is true of Roeg's direction - instead of cheese we get a real sensation of doom. Rather than picture-postcard Venice we have rats, crumbling buildings and a bleakly-coloured maze full of confusion.

We are also left wondering about the supporting cast (even at the end we are not sure of everyone's good character). The two dotty old sisters. The shifty priest. The hotel manager. Even the police detective seems a little suspicious. Visual motifs recur - a child's ball, the red of the dead girl's coat - are they hints from the dead girl to her parents?

Of course the film is famous for its sex scene, and it is justly celebrated. A scene of love-making is inter-cut with shots of the couple dressing for dinner. This is one of the few cases in film where the scene is necessary to the story - the couple have become distant but the meeting with the two sisters may actually have brought them back together. It is also (if this is the right word) tastefully done - a very human scene depicting true love and not just sex.

"Don't Look Now" is a wonderful puzzle - eerie, tragic, human and until the last scenes, maddeningly hard to solve. When all is revealed, you want to go back and start again.

One last point: this is based on a short story by the great Daphne duMaurier. After she saw the film, she sent the director a letter saying how the couple in his film reminded her of a sad couple she once saw in a hotel and imagined why they were so unhappy - the real-life couple who inspired her original story. I think this shows how Roeg has given the film a real believability and humanity.

And that's about it. Not much of a premise. And not a lot of plot. But plenty of mood. This may be based on a Daphne Du Maurier story, it may feature two of the finest leads in seventies cinema, but essentially the film is carried by Roeg's otherworldly direction - all distorted lenses, bizarre cross-cutting and non-linear timescales. Roeg's genius, as previously declared in Performance and Walkabout, is his ability to position his films not merely from the point of view of his protagonists, but to place the camera firmly inside their minds. Time, continuity of events, even mere sounds and images become abstractions, all mixed-up through Roeg's wholly unique use of montage. A drop of 'blood' smears across a slide transparency moments before the daughter drowns; a block of masonry gradually falls in slow motion as we cross cut to Sutherland working below in real time; a moment of doubt is cross-cut with a sinister 'reaction' shot of the old women laughing at an unheard joke. Like a poet, Roeg offers no explanation for these images, but then he doesn't need to - their beauty is that we understand them on a purely instinctive, intuitive level. A case in point is the celebrated sex scene, which shocks not because it is supposedly explicit (in fact, clever editing and suggestive angles means that we see much less than we think we see) but because Roeg intercuts it with shots of the couple dressing for dinner. Suddenly what could have been the obligatory gratuitous nude scene (Christie was then a major sex symbol, and Sutherland had his fans too) becomes a disturbingly intimate insight into their relationship and the effect their daughter's death has had. It's too painful, too raw, to be titillating.

This kind of montaging occurs throughout the film, indeed by juxtaposing unrelated shots and scenes, Roeg is almost telling a story that isn't there (surely the 'blood' was just a coincidence; how could the women really have been laughing at Sutherland?). Oh, there's a mystery too - is the small red-coated figure Sutherland glimpses really his daughter returned from the dead? - but even that is tenuous, possibly imagined (like the ambiguous mystery in Antonioni's Blow Up, Coppola's The Conversation or Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut), a maguffin to facilitate Roeg's examination of loss, guilt and denial. Like Blue Velvet or 2001, Don't Look Now is a rare, brilliant example of cinema being used to tell a story that would be unfeasible in any other medium (the film is markedly different to Du Maurier's original story). But then this impressionistic approach has always been the true legacy of British cinema (see Michael Powell, Ken Russell, Lindsay Anderson, Donald Cammell, Danny Boyle, early Richard Lester, even early Ridley Scott, not to mention honorary Brits like Losey and Kubrick), not gangster movies, period dramas or genteel rom-coms. And no-one, but no-one, pushed the envelope further than Roeg. Hopefully with this DVD reissue, people will look now (ouch!) and give this genius the credit he deserves.