Unraveling the Knot: Don’t Look Now (1973) A Mesmeric Paradox of Grief in Uncanny Red: Part 2

Of Grief & Ghosts: The Plot of Don’t Look Now (1973)

“The story evolves like a mosaic with the important pieces missing, just like one of those that John is restoring. Not unlike how the dissolution of the sealing material destroys the structures in the church, the reality of Baxters’ life is falling apart, too. These cracks either should be mended, or they allow the forces from beyond and under to creep through them. The latter is especially true for John with his gift of clairvoyance, although resisted, or maybe especially because he resists it.” — from Film Obsessive article by Magda Mariamidze

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”— Gospel of Thomas

John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) bear the mark of a curse, a chilling revelation hinted at at the film’s outset. Don’t Look Now is a film about grief and loss. This is the most potent horror there is. Aside from the killings in Venice, it is these principles that are the true nature of this horror film. Roeg’s masterpiece, the specter of death, and its companion grief are palpable and agonizingly real. The titles in quotations are baptized by the torrential British rain that licks the screen.

A Tragic Prelude: or In the Wake of Loss: The Opening of Don’t Look Now:

John Baxter: What are you reading?
Laura Baxter: I was just trying to find the answer to a question Christine was asking me: if the world’s round, why is a frozen lake flat?
John Baxter: Huh. That’s a good question.
Laura Baxter: [flipping through a book] Ah-ha. “Lake Ontario curves more than 3 degrees from its easternmost shore to its westernmost shore.” So, frozen water really isn’t flat!
John Baxter: Nothing is what it seems.

The juxtaposition of these images is Roeg’s way of highlighting the profuse symbolism consciously scattered throughout key scenes of Don’t Look Now. Here, I found a visible but not readily apparent cue signaling the dichotomy between the forces at work. Laura and the Red Devil, with their backs, turned to us.

Though it’s a sunny day, we get a sense that it is a typically damp English morning mist in the yard of a country estate. The film cuts back and forth between the Baxters and their two children, playing outside by the pond. Christine and Johnny’s parents are lost in a world of idle contentment within the house. The air hangs heavy with a bourgeois harmony. Both are tuned into their work, though, with an unhurried cadence.

Laura is reading Beyond The Fragile Geometry of Space, a book that can be seen on the sofa, so that she can answer Christine’s question about the earth’s shape. John comments, “ Nothing is as it seems.”

Alongside du Maurier’s narrative, the film begins with Laura investigating the answer to Christine’s insightful curiosity: ” If the earth is round, why is a frozen pond flat?” This question highlights a paradox, as both statements can be seen as valid yet fundamentally contradictory.

The remnants of a lazy Sunday lunch linger: dishes abandoned, forks and knives scattered, while a thin ribbon of smoke rises from a forgotten cigarette in an ashtray, painting a picture of contented indulgence.

Their two young children, Johnny and Christine, continue to play around the pond on their bucolic property. Christine (Sharon Williams), an angelic little blonde girl in a shiny red Mac with the bright look of fresh blood—red like a bleeding heart—wanders around the pond pushing a wheelbarrow and chasing a bouncing ball. The sunny blue day surrounds the murky surface of the pond choked with reeds. The pond doesn’t reflect the sky, but the water is like a mirror to Christine’s red raincoat as she skirts her playful path. Meanwhile, her brother weaves through the trees on his bike, a silent fluttering moth against the verdant backdrop.

Christine’s playful moments with her ball create an unsettling visual dance. The little sphere, adorned with a crimson geometric design against the hazy day, seems to pulse and warp as it tumbles across the ground into the pond. This optical illusion subtly disturbs our perception, adding to the film’s undercurrent of unease without drawing attention to itself. She is holding her brother’s toy soldier, Action Man, who, when you pull the string, possesses the recorded voice of a woman calling out strategic military commands.

As soon as Christine tugs the string on her doll, it utters, “Enemy 1000 feet…fall in.” In that instant, Johnny topples over his bike, is felled by a rock, and is cut by a shard of broken glass after he has ridden his bike over a pane of glass, shattering it beneath the with of his tires.

In this stunning opening sequence, architect John Baxter is prepping for a restoration of a church in Venice. He scrutinizes his projector loaded with slides—of an Italian church. Laura Baxter reads her books, and John is studying his slides of the medieval church he will be reviving. He focuses on one slide, in particular, of a stained glass window; the façade of piety is splendid, with the figure of Christ adorned in red robes. However, he has no solid faith or spirituality of his own to cling to.

It is the shadowy corner of the slide that catches John’s eye—a small, enigmatic red form huddled in a pew, cloaked in a red coat and hood. The sight triggers a sudden, curious feeling. This intruding presence, small, perhaps childlike in appearance, becomes the catalyst for John’s sudden, horrifying vision—an intuitive warning to him that Christine is in danger.

John accidentally knocks over a glass of water and watches with curiosity as a red stain emerges from the small figure, like blood, creeping across the slide. A seemingly unremarkable mishap ignites an unsettling vision that John’s mind conjures. The red figure melts into a disambiguated crimson swirl that coils around the church’s stained-glass window. By the time it settles, it is almost fetal in shape; the veiled red figure, once a mere curiosity, now takes on a sinister aspect. A vision of Christine wearing the same evocative color, red, becoming submerged in the murky depths of the nearby pond.

He leaps to his feet and heads for the door. Laura asks him what is happening. “Nothing,” he tells her.
Laura tosses a slide onto the book on metaphysics as the image continues to bleed.

John runs out of the house, hurls himself at the pond, past his son, his hand cut from the piece of broken glass; he screams, “Dad!”

When John reaches the water, it feels like it takes forever for him to reach Christine; frozen by his anguish, he then plunges in and pulls his red angel from the watery nothingness, her lifeless body wrenched up into his arms as he agonizes over her limp body with drenched blonde wisps. Roeg intercuts this moment of visual artistry with the harrowing sight of John trying to trudge through the water until he breaks through. Christine’s lifeless body is cradled in his arms as time and reality blur – in an unreadable mixture that will become past and present.

Continue reading “Unraveling the Knot: Don’t Look Now (1973) A Mesmeric Paradox of Grief in Uncanny Red: Part 2”

Unraveling the Knot: Don’t Look Now (1973) A Mesmeric Paradox of Grief in Uncanny Red: Part 1

The basic tenet of horror movies – ‘ Nothing is as it seems ‘ and for me, Don’t Look Now is a death of all certainties.

In the early seventies, when even mainstream films could be fearless and experimental, smashing taboos and taunting the censors, it was non-conformists who offered cinemagoing a uniquely intense experience.

 “Don’t Look Now 1973 retains its power and mystery today thanks to Roeg’s mastery of what Alfred Hitchcock famously called “pure cinema,” manifest in his visual sleight of hand and, above all, in his refusal to be bound by the conventions of dialogue-driven narrative and simple chronology. All this has shaped a style that has justifiably come to be described as “Roegian.”– (David Thompson: Seeing Red 2015 article CRITERION )

“Nothing is what it seems,” says John Baxter, the protagonist of Don’t Look Now, at the start of the film. The rest of the movie depicts the tragedy of Baxter’s incapacity to apply this fundamental wisdom in his own life. “Nothing is what it seems” may be an untested platitude, but it’s a truism when it comes to movies, and Don’t Look Now is one of the great “movies-about-movie-watching” ever made. Primarily, it is about the act of perception itself… By seeing an event that has not yet happened as something that is already happening (what-will-be as what-is), he (John) fatally confuses the signs and makes the future the past, i.e., irrevocable, inescapable. Like a movie stamped on celluloid, or the glimpse of the satanic dwarf on the slide Baxter is handling in the opening scene, he fixes something in time, and thereby turns life into death.”— (article – Jasun Horsley Cinephilia and Beyond)

“He was a genius, Nic. A visionary. He made a love scene between a grieving wife and herhusband with no cries of passion, no sounds of orgasm, no words. All you hear is Pino Donaggio’s music as Nic intercuts their making love with them getting dressed to go out to dinner. Magical. You don’t see that scene as a voyeur. You watch it and it reminds you of yourself, of you being loving and you being loved. We decided it would be wisest not to shoot John’s death scene until we’d done everything else, in case the unreliable prop knife failed and my throat would be cut, spilling red. Fragmented, abstract images colour and tell his stories. Look at Omar Sharif on a camel, coming from the other end of the desert towards the camera. That’s Nic. Look at the Sahara’s empty foreground and suddenly the smokestacks of a steamer crossing from left to right along the unseen Suez canal. That’s Nic. He was the was the first to use Panavision’s R-200°, which meant he had 15 degrees more shutter for Don’t Look Now than the 185°s that were the best before. He was everything I ever wanted from a filmmaker. He changed my life forever. Francine and I asked him if we could name our firstborn after him. He said yes. Our glorious son is named Roeg.” -  (Interview – Donald Sutherland)

Continue reading “Unraveling the Knot: Don’t Look Now (1973) A Mesmeric Paradox of Grief in Uncanny Red: Part 1”

The Film Score Freak Recognizes: And little things between…

 Above photo of composer Dave Grusin

The art of film wouldn’t resonate without the language of music to help speak for it!

*And don’t think I forgot Jerry Goldsmith. He is my ultimate inspiration and will get a feature tribute all to himself!

*Billy Goldenberg

(Columbo episodes) Murder by the Book and Ransom for a dead man.

*Gil Mellé

The Sentinel 1977

Embryo 1976

Columbo episodes-Blueprint for Murder 1972, Short Fuse, Dead Weight and Death Lends a Hand

*Malcolm Williamson

Crescendo 1970

*Johnny Mandel

The Sandpiper 1965

*Dave Grusin

Columbo episode Presciption Murder (1968)

3 Days of the Condor 1973

The Nickel Ride 1974

*Michel Legrand

The Thomas Crown Affair 1968

Summer of ’42 (1971)

*Krzysztof Komeda

Rosemary’s Baby 1968 (courtesy of Soundtrack Fred)

*Jerry Fielding

The Enforcer 1976

The Mechanic 1972

The Big Sleep 1978

*Pino Dinaggio

Don’t Look Now 1973

*Francis Lai

live for life 1967

Bilitis 1977

The Forbidden Room 1977

*Colin Towns

The Haunting of Julia 1977 aka Full Circle

*Jaime Mendoza-Nave

The Brotherhood of Satan 1971

*Fred Myrow

Soylent Green 1973

*Waldo De Los Rios

The House that Screamed 1969

*David Raksin

Force of Evil 1948

The Big Combo 1955

Night Tide 1961

The Bad and the Beautiful 1952

*George Duning 

Picnic 1955

The Devil at 4 O’Clock 1961

*Ernest Gold

Ship of Fools 1965

*Maurice Jarre

Ash Wednesday 1973

Les yeux sans visage (1960)

*Alex North

A Streetcar Named Desire 1951

Hard Contract 1969

Shanks 1974 (courtesy of Goregirlsdungeon)

Spartacus 1960 love theme

The Children’s Hour 1961

*David Shire

Norma Rae 1979 “It goes like it goes”

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

The Conversation 1974

*Quincy Jones

The Getaway 1972

*Michael Small

Klute 1971

The Stepford Wives 1975

Audrey Rose 1977

*Lalo Schifrin

The Fox 1967

Cool Hand Luke 1967

Prime Cut 1972

Bullitt 1968

*Ennio Morricone

The Sicilian Clan 1969

courtesy of Soundtrack of the Mind

Violent City 1970

*Kenyon Hopkins

12 Angy Men (1957)

*Ron Grainer

The Omega Man 1971

*John Carpenter

Escape from New York 1981

*Trevor Jones

courtesy of Soundtrack of the Mind

Labyrinth 1986

This is your EverLovin’ Joey sayin’ all the beautiful little things between – will always stay the same here at The Last Drive In!