Midway through “Lime Tree Arbour,” a stand-out track on the much loved The Boatman’s Call, Nick Cave claims, “There will always be suffering/ It flows through life like water.” In art, water has long been considered a symbol of pureness, healing, cleansing and rebirth. At the end of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the impotent Jake Barnes experiences a renascence of sorts when he dives into the Bay of Biscay. Yet, why does Cave compare this classically nourishing element to misery?
Cave isn’t the only artist who peered into the murky depths of water and saw not only beauty, but horror. In Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 horror masterpiece, Don’t Look Now, water figures prominently. Set mainly in Venice, a city slowly sinking into the sea a few millimeters per year, Don’t Look Now sees water as the agent of giving both life and death. Though Roeg based the movie and took its title from a Daphne du Maurier short story, this unique, beautiful and terrifying film is clearly the work of the master director who also gave us Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth.
The film opens with a shot of rain drumming down on a pond, disturbing its placid face with its fury. Though bucolic, the pond will soon spell the end of Christine, the young daughter of John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie), as she drowns there at the start of the film. When the film opens, John and Laura are working in their quaint British home as their two children play outside. John, who restores old churches, is examining a slide where a figure in a red jacket sits in a pew contemplating a stained glass window. Roeg cuts between these interior scenes to the children outside, Christine dressed in a shiny red rain coat. When John accidentally spills water on his slide, the red in the image bleeds out across the photo. Immediately, John has a vision of Christine submerged in water and rushes outside to find his premonition true. Wracked with grief, the couple retreats to Venice to convalesce their suffering hearts.
For a pair mourning a drowning, a city taken over by water may be an odd choice. Yet, Venice just might be the place where they can finally heal. At breakfast one morning, they meet a pair of elderly British sisters who are visiting on holiday. The blind one claims to have psychic powers and tells Laura that Christine is well, however they must leave Venice immediately since John’s life is in danger. Warmed by the former part of the medium’s vision, Laura begins to heal, realizing that her daughter is in a good place. John, however, refuses to believe the psychic, claiming that “seeing is believing.” Yet, there are clues that John himself is psychic, including his premonition of Christine’s death, though he refuses to believe any of it true.
While John and Laura try to heal, something horrible lurks in the alleys and canals of Venice. A murderer is on the loose. Bodies are pulled from the depths of the water with their throats sliced. Though this subplot is subsidiary, a tributary from the main story in Don’t Look Now, it eventually plays a tragic part in the couple’s rebirth. Roeg steeps his film rich in a creepy atmosphere. His Venice isn’t a wonderland of gondolas and mobs of tourists. Roeg shoots his Venice in winter, a dormant city entwined in tendrils of mist. All of the furniture in the lobby of the Baxters’ hotel is covered up as the city is ready to enter hibernation.
From this slumbering milieu comes new life. In the film’s centerpiece, John and Laura make love in a tender, yet graphic scene. Roeg intercuts their coupling with scenes of the couple getting dressed, showing the act not in a lurid or sexy light, but as a tender exchange between the pair. It may be the first time they have had sex since their daughter’s death. It is certainly the first time Laura has allowed herself to feel passion. This may very well be the most realistic and intimate sex scene ever filmed. The gravity of the scene suggests they are healing by conceiving another child.
Both Sutherland and Christie give career performances in Don’t Look Now, but the film wouldn’t have been the same without Roeg’s presence. Unlike Hitchcock’s adaptations of du Maurier’s work, Roeg chooses not to employ straightforward narrative. He is liberal in his sense of time, opening and closing the film in a series of montages that play out with the same flow of a meandering river. In the short story, Christine dies from meningitis, but if Roeg remained true to his source material, he couldn’t have juxtaposed the opening of Christine’s drowning with John figuratively drowning in his own blood at the film’s close. And yet, while John’s life flashes before his eyes in the form of earlier scenes from the movie, there is something beautiful in his final moments. Perhaps Roeg is making the case that water is life and that all of its forms, from birth to death, are simply part of its unceasing flow.