Looking over one's shoulder isn't the best idea to do when the title of the movie is Don't look now, however Donald Sutherland was constantly doing so as John Baxter in Venice. He's on an assignment to restore a building for the Church. At first I thought that he too was seeing things but wasn't telling his wife. Then, like so many other movies directed by Nicolas Roeg, the mood and story shifted to John Baxter's search for his wife who seems to have run off with some women that she met in town that communicate with the Baxter's deceased daughter.
Some of the double exposure shots in this movie are really impressive. I'm sure that at the time the movie was released for the first time it was really innovative. I'm sure Roeg's time as a cinematographer helped in choosing the locations and shot selections for this movie to compel the suspenseful tone and the disconnected feeling of the film.
I was surprised to see how well Donald Sutherland's character changed over the course of the movie. His crass dismissal of the two women as crazy and non-sense was later revealed to him as something he was afraid to understand. When he took the blind sister home it was a really nice gesture.
Of the movies we watched in class and Don't Look Now, there was some veiled attempt to place some sexual encounter in the story for what seemed a random scene. It didn't lead to anything in Don't Look Now, other than to follow in some unwritten rule that if you have sex in a horror movie, you would die. Sex in films show the immorality of the culture with men chasing their secretaries or friends of wives in some way. If it has no other bearing on the story, why put in in? This helps ticket sales and recognition of the actresses, right?! Yes, Julie Christie has had a wonderful career in film, however this film came 10 years after Julie's first movie and by then she was already in her 30's. She has gone onto a long and varied career in film, only returning to horror/thriller territory a handful of times.
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