I am not recommending you spend time with these two films because both star leggy men in relaxed, impeccably tailored suits, but that would be reason enough. Rather, the sunlight and heat-induced torpor of mid-summer make for the ideal setting for engaging in two films that deal with death and loss.
Don’t Look Now (1973) is Nicolas Roeg’s third film (currently available on Criterion | Mubi). Roeg had previous worked as a cinematographer (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Far From the Madding Crowd).
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play John and Laura Baxter, a couple still fractured by the accidental death of their daughter. They are in Venice in winter, where John is restoring a church for a vaguely sinister bishop.
Roeg’s 1973 film is based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, queen of the uncomfortable narrative. (Also, thanks to this BBC archive clip, a hunt-and-peck, not touch typer.)
Roeg doesn’t let you doubt their love for a moment, even as he shows you the strain of grief and loneliness. He places them in maze of Venice; its geography forcing backtracks and its canals doubling the view. Roeg gives you sequences that are visually sharp but narratively uncertain: are you in the past, in a memory, or in a potential future?
One of the most glorious time bending sequences is the sex scene notorious enough to make it into Sutherland’s obit. From the moment it begins, Roeg intercuts the intimate act with shots of Christie and Sutherland dressing for dinner after. The scene unfolds before you and in the characters’ memories at the same time.
Christie, in a 2015 BBC documentary said of the scene “It was just flesh squirming and rolling and touching, and God I thought it was absolutely lovely.” Her boyfriend at the time, Warren Beatty was so upset by it he allegedly flew to London have it cut from the film.
The sex is hot, full stop. But it gets there through the edit, which reminds you that recall can be half the pleasure. Wait for Christie tapping her Mary Quant mascara against her mouth in remembered pleasure. Perhaps a perfect capture of satisfaction.
The two leads are almost manic in their attempts to hold on to each other, rather than the loss, the death that has occupied them both. When death returns, it feels inevitable, almost a release.
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“Then during the pandemic, when death entered our lives in such a way that was collectively important, I decided to write this film that also talks about our relationship with the world of death,” Alice Rohrwacher told the film journal Little White Lies about her latest.
La Chimera is Rohrwacher’s third feature. Vogue speculates it’s the closing film in an “informal” trilogy on Italian identity. I prefer Rohrwacher’s take: “Not as a trilogy, but as three paintings on an altar, and they share their relationship with the past.”
Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, an Englishman transplanted to Italy where he has found and lost his true love and fallen in with tombaroli—grave robbers.
We follow him into grave after grave, watch him tangle with his fence Spartaco (a glorious performance by Rohrwacher’s sister, Alba1) and watch as he almost slips out of his grief through a woman named Italia.
Time loops in on itself in Rohrwacher’s film, and so does space. Rohrwacher does these beautiful 360 camera somersaults which turn O’Connor upside down within the frame. Arthur has premonitions of his end: dreams where he is back with Beniamina or in conversation with the dead.
Rohrwacher says that archeology and film making are joined by a sense of seeing a hint of an object, a story, and digging until the entire shape comes together. “The most beautiful moment is shaping everything we have found into a story and seeing a story that belongs to us, and is our past, and someone else’s past also.”2
Arthur is hunting the entire film. For Beniamina. For graves and antiquities. And yet there is space for him to almost fall into Italia’s world. To laugh at her terrible singing and let her steal his cigarettes. To hold and chase his grief while finding beauty in the current moment.
“She has no face,” Spartaco tells her audience of collectors about the statue she has stolen away from Arthur and his gang. “That means she can be anyone.”
Love and grief can coincide. Perhaps it’s not that Arthur doesn’t want to give up grave robbing, but that he isn’t certain he wants to live with it as his past.
“Every time I’m making a film and I come across a situation, it’s a little tricky, and I start asking myself, “Why in the world am I doing this? Why didn’t I choose to do something easier?” Then the light comes on for me and I realize I enjoy this fatigue …” Rohrwacher told Jeremy O. Harris. “Everyone is learning about something, and they’re taking a step toward a world that they did not know.”
Here are two films that require you to watch. Not skim, not have on in the background while you hunt for winter coats on summer discount or high-waisted, pleated shorts to get you through August. You have to surrender, completely, to their time and grief-folding ways.
This joint interview with the sisters by Sofia Coppola is a great read and made me think about making art with my sister.
(Notice that both the Lincoln Center interview and this one from Letterboxed were shot on the same press junket and one feels expensive and one feels cheap and that’s the power of editing and scoring.)