PARTISAN REV lEW
275
terms of cinema language,
Don't Look Now
is irritatingly overwrit–
ten. What bothers me most about the work is not its self-referring
brilliances, but its irresponsibility toward what it evokes, which
seems to me more a failure of vision and seriousness than a moral
deficiency. To put it another way, there's something a bit stupid
about the film's self-insistent c1evernesses . So much is evoked and
so little of it is made to count, the work exposing its own empti–
ness at every turn. The surprise ending in which a hideous dwarf,
costumed like the protagonist's dead daughter, kills the gu ilt-rid–
den father--he has already had a prescient vision of his own
funeral- - seems contemptib ly cheap (like the ending of Altman's
Images,
another piece of mind-blowing elegance).
The material is highly charged. A
girl
child playing near a
pond drowns, in the complexly orchestrated opening scene . At
the very moment the child falls in the water, her father spi lls some
liquid (wine or water) on a slide of a section of stained glass in a
church he has been hired to restore--the daugh ter (or another
hooded small figure) also in the picture. The father (Donald Suth–
erland--his wife is played by Juli e Christie) has a premonition
and rushes to the pond, pulls the daughter out but is too late to
save her. His beautiful daughter is lifeless . He tries mouth-to–
mouth resuscitation.
It
is a painful and terrible scene, almost (if
you happen to be a parent) too much to bear. The camera, the
beauty of the photography, distances us slightly. The charge of the
rest of the film comes out of the visceral experience of being too
late--preoccupied with one's own concerns yet troubled by pre–
monition--to save one's chi ld from drowning.
Don't Look Now,
if y ield ed to, exp lo its our gui lt as aud ience
at being unab le, like the father, to save the child. The rest of the
movie, which offers a number of visual correlat ives to the drown–
ing, cheats shamelessly, but with so much cinematic aut ho rity - –
how can a director who kn ows
this
much not really know what
he's doing--that o ne trusts it more than o ne ought. The Suther–
land character's punishment for .. . what-- negligence, gui lt, not
believing in the supernatural?--far exceeds whatever his crime.
The tricky resolution of the film, the imbalance of the punish–
ment, betrays our trust as an audience and is disturbing, perhaps
deeply disturbing, for just th at reason. That the ce ntral character
