I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started to watch “Don’t look now”. The two reasons I chose to view this movie had nothing to do with its content: It had Donald Sutherland in it and it was on the Guardian’s top 1000 movie list. Had I known that it is a “psychic thriller” I would have been less thrilled by it as that’s not my favorite genre.
The story seems simple, but I still may not have fully figured it out. An American architect, played by Sutherland, is restoring a church in Venice Italy and has his wife with him. They meet two elderly sisters, one of whom is a blind and psychic. She helps the architect’s wife to overcome her depression caused by her daughter’s drowning. But the architect thinks of the psychic as a fraud and wants his wife to deal with the tragedy without the false hope that the psychic ca communicate with the dead daughter. The tension rises as the architect wants to prove that the psychic is misleading his wife, but he starts to see things such as the little red riding hood style cape their daughter wore at the time of her death. He keeps chasing this figure that appears on the streets and canals of Venice until…
That’s the story in a nutshell, which is one of the three backbones of the story. The second is the scenery of Venice itself. The image most of us have of this town is a romantic, artsy, elegant and fun. Here we get none of this. We are out of season and Sutherland stays at a hotel a a last guest, while the hotel manager keeps wanting to shut down the facility for the winter. The only art we get is the church that needs restoring and almost kills the protagonist. As far as romance goes there is an infamous, long and chaotic sex scene of the couple, that ends their bickering that lasted since the death of their daughter. But even that is chaotic as it is intercut with them getting dressed.
The movie’s wikipedia page lists dozens of references that other movies, songs, books point to this film. It surely was influential. It’s imagery was strong and I will remember many scenes for a long time. Even if I don’t want to.