Cinema
Don't Look Now
Nicolas Roeg · 1973
Synopsis
Under the opening credits, rain falls on a pond. A weekend in the English countryside: two children play outside, little Christine in a red raincoat, her brother on a bicycle. In the house, the mother looks in a book for the answer to a question from her daughter: why is a frozen pond flat if the earth is round? The father examines slides of a Venetian church, where a stained-glass Christ is dressed in red and where a small hooded figure of the same colour sits on a bench. He spills a glass of water on a slide, and the red begins to run.
Context
Daphne du Maurier's short story from which the film is drawn, published in 1971, has the child die of meningitis; the drowning is an invention of the film. The love scene was added at the last moment, because the director feared that the couple would be seen only quarrelling. To spare it the most severe rating in the United States, he himself cut nine frames. In 2011, a former editor of Variety claimed in a book that the scene had not been simulated; the actor and the producer denied it immediately.
Who it is for
One hundred and ten minutes, in English with subtitles or in a French version. The editing sometimes slips into the present images of what is to come.
Prizes and reception
In the United Kingdom, it was released as the top of a double bill whose second feature was The Wicker Man.