A very different animal than the witty, character-based Daphne Du Maurier short story on which it’s based, this adaptation of Don’t Look Now by director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Witches) is primarily an achievement in hallucinatory editing. (Graeme Clifford is the credited editor.) It’s not only the intrusive hard cuts and dreamy dissolves that capture the discombobulated psycho-spiritual state experienced by a couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) grieving the death of their young daughter while on a trip to Venice. It’s also in the way the fairly hardcore sex scene between them is gently interrupted with lovely little visual snippets of husband and wife playfully dressing for dinner in the aftermath of their conjugal bliss. Christie is flawless, as usual, especially in her emotionally desperate scenes with a pair of older sisters, one of whom claims to have seen the spirit of the dead girl. But Sutherland suffers not only from being 1970s Donald Sutherland—a distracting sasquatch—but also by the fact that the screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant is too intent on turning his pompous, repressed husband into the villain. That makes the shocking, gory climax a bit more thematically explicable than it is in the book, but also, oddly, less tragic.
(11/1/2021)
