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…piece of groundbreaking cinema now on BBC TWO.
This one's a hugely acclaimed thriller
with strong language.
Tonight on Moviedrome, one of the most moving sex scenes in cinema
and one of the scariest endings.
It can only be Nic Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now”.
“Don’t Look Now” has a really gothic story.
A daughter dies, is drowned. Her parent’s life is shattered because of that drowning.
They go to Venice and are haunted by the memories of her death.
The film is based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier
In the short story, the girl dies of meningitis and the story doesn't really
start until after that death
and the parents are in Venice grieving. So there's a kind of retrospective feel about it.
The short story is more a scarefest. It’s intended to spook you.
The film is intended to do that also but it's also to do with romantic love,
about the possibility of love,
about your fear
of your loved one dying. It’s a kind of richer experience, the film.
It’s directed by old favorite of Moviedrome Nic Roeg. This was his third film.
Previously he'd made “Walkabout” and “Performance” and many people think
it’s his best.
If you know any other Nic Roeg films you'll spot that this is one of his immediately.
It’s because the time is fractured in the film. Nic Roeg famously
was entranced by the way editing could change time forward and backwards
and so he does it here.
His main character is psychic in someway, and can see the future.
But it’s like the film can see the future aswell. It flashes forward to what's going to happen.
This is very Nic Roegian.
This film starts at a grand country house
in a grand estate.
It’s a quintessential upper middle-class setting.
and Roeg who comes from a middle class background himself seems
absolutely obsessed by the idea that middle-class culture represses things.
Represses the truth about what it's like to be alive, the agony,
the fear of death, all these things. And he seems to plant a bomb under those kind of themes
and explodes them and that's why his films are so exciting.
The husband in the picture, John Baxter, is played by Donald Sutherland,
the canadian actor, who was a political radical in the sixties.
He was in MASH in 1968.
The wife is, brilliantly,
erotically, played by Julie Christie, who’d worked three times before with Roeg,
on “Fahrenheit 451”, on “Julia” and “Far from the Madding Crowd”.
She always seems
to choose brilliant directors, throughout the 60s and 70s.
We really believe
that these two characters and married. We really believe that they are in love
and then some how
we feel as if we see their relationship over time.
I think that's partly because of the famous sex scene,
where Roeg intercuts them making love with getting dressed afterwards
and it’s absolutely emotional. It’s partly the music and it's just partly
the intensity of that sex scene.
Now there were rumors going around that they did it for real and the outtakes were doing
the rounds of the studios in Hollywood, in secret screening rooms.
But Roeg said that only 9 frames at that scene were cut from the final film.
“Don’t look Now” was voted the 8th best British film of all time.
And it's simply I think because it’s so dazzlingly brilliantly made.
It was released at the same time as “The Exorcist” and you could argue that it’s
more layered and more brilliant and more unusual, than “The Exorcist”.
I think this is a really brilliant Moviedrome picture because it's absolutely
honest about fear.
It’s absolutely honest also that the way your life can be broken up
by a tragic event, and it's dazzlingly inventive cinematically.