Time Out London recently posted their top 100 titles generated by an impressive list of industry experts. I had not seen their number one pick – Don’t Look Now – so I thought I’d give it a go via Netflix. Are there any lovers out there, because I didn’t get it. I guess it is a great addition to the neurotic male genre (or maybe the paranoid gothic), but I thought it was a bit silly.
I liked Don’t Look Now. It had sexy times with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.
I went Roeg in a big way in college, I think spurred by a prof. I always loved the fracturing of time in his movies, and I appreciated how his common tactics complicated/engaged the spooky so well. I preferred Walkabout, and the opening to the Dennis-Potter-scripted Track 29 remains among my favorite credit sequences(Gary Oldman hitchhiking, in what at first looks like a still photo, as John Lennon yells about “Mother”).
But Don’t Look was big for me, kind of blasted some of my assumptions about narrative in film…
… that said, I hit a Roeg wall and have in recent returns found him more technically interesting than pleasurable.