DON'T LOOK NOW (1973: Dir. Nicolas Roeg)
Precognition is a tricky device to pull off in a film. To portray it poetically, without resorting to crude editing and cheap shock effects is the real prize, and no one has done it with more art and taste than Nicolas Roeg in Don't Look Now. Roeg, a former cameraman and cinematographer (Lawrence of Arabia, Petulia), was the reigning king of the flash-forward, a technique he often employed to give his films a kind of interior dream logic, thus injecting the audience deep into the minds of his protagonists. From James Fox's protean gangster in Performance (1970), to David Bowie's asexual alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), Roeg illustrated the fears and insecurities of these characters by inserting unsettling visions of past and future reality into the cinematic narrative of his films. As the grieving father on a working holiday in Venice, Donald Sutherland is another of Roeg's troubled heroes, and it is Roeg's bold visual and editing choices that make the morbid dread of Sutherland's tragic fate such a traumatic experience for audiences, leaving the shaken viewer with a very palpable sense of loss after the final credits roll. DVD & BLU-RAY
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