MovieChat Forums > Don't Look Now Discussion > The best Venice film

The best Venice film

posted 4 years ago by Otter (24464)
3 replies | jump to latest

Other films that have scenes set in Venice glamorize the place, they have characters having coffee in glowingly beautiful plazas that somehow aren't mobbed with tourists, they photograph the place in golden sunlight and a romantic haze.

But "Don't Look Now" captures the real Venice I saw, which is beautiful, but ancient and very strange. Crumbling buildings, mysterious gates and doorways, dripping back alleys stained with centuries of moisture and decay, crumbling brick and high-water marks from the floods. A city which doesn't have roads but alleys as narrow as hallways to get from here to there, which are barely lit at night, where it's impossible to go anywhere in a straight line or keep your sense of direction, where who knows what is lurking in the shadows and the only sign of life is the sound of people living overhead or boating in the unseen canals. Which is what makes Venice AWESOME, a unique and fascinating trip out of the modern world.

If this movie wasn't good in its own right, I could watch it 200 times just to see the real Venice.

[–] rudeboymurray (3281) 4 years ago

Death in Venice is my personal favourite - it also has a unusual, haunting quality to its (admittedly beautiful) views of the city.

But Don’t Look Now is a close second. For a more typically romanticised view I do really like David Lean’s Summertime, too.

[–] Otter (24464) 4 years ago

Venice has never looked better than in "Summertime", which is the ultimate Venice glamour film! In that movie the whole city looked like it's made of iridescent blue and gold! And it's never crowded, and the tourists are all well-dressed! Hah!

I went to Venice twice, and yeah, some of it is drop-dead glamorous, but it's the crumbling alleys where you are as guaranteed to get lost as a character in a fairy-tale magic forest that are the most memorable thing about it. There's plenty of beauty spots in the world, but so few places where so much of ancient ways of life still exist. I mean, it's the only city in the world that has no cars, you get from here to there by boat or by wandering around and inevitably getting lost, and stumbling across some fantastical antiquity, which is probably crumbling into brick dust before your eyes. It's like a very interesting dream, and "Don't Look Now" completely captured that feeling.

[–] Melton (4910) a year ago

I loved the creepy building at the end. Ornate but small and full of odd, liminal spaces. Forgotten and decaying, covered in a blanket of smokey mist.

That shot of John’s quivering foot sticking out of that tiny window thing, with blood pouring down, as he bleeds out in some cold, forgotten space with only his killer - a psychotic, hideous, grinning old woman dwarf - for company… is deeply nightmarish.

What is that building supposed to be. What kind of a ‘room’ was he killed in?