Don’t Look Now
Friday May 8th
Time Out called it “The Greatest British Film of All Time”
I’m not going to argue.
Don’t Look Now
“She’s with you, and she’s smiling. And wearing her little red coat.”
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now topped Time Out’s Best British Film poll a few years back, ahead of Lawrence of Arabia, A Matter of Life and Death, and all the big splashy ones most people would have bet on.
It surprised me too. It shouldn’t have.
Based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, it follows John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), a grieving couple who travel to Venice while he restores a crumbling church. The city in winter is already a character before anything else happens. Flooded alleys, closed hotels, a chill you can feel through the screen. Two sisters they meet at a restaurant believe one of them can see what the Baxters have lost. From there the film becomes a ghost story, a thriller, a marital drama, and something much harder to name.
What I’d want you to watch for is the editing. Roeg and his editor Graeme Clifford do something in the first five minutes that I used to teach as a masterclass, the way two images placed next to each other create a meaning that neither one carries on its own. Red in the water. A reflection where a child should be. A small sound that cuts to a face on the other side of a house.
By the time the opening incident arrives the film has already told you everything and nothing.
It’s one of the most disciplined pieces of British filmmaking ever made, and at the Plaza on a Friday night in May, in a beautiful 4k restoration, it’ll look extraordinary.
Friday 8 May, 8:30pm. Plaza Truro.
Come and look at this.
