Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

[This is my (very belated) August entry in Blind Spots.]

Don't Look Now begins with a fade out from rain cascading upon a puddle to shutter-shielded glass windows letting a few obscured rays of sunlight through the slats. These are soothing images, the first in a film filled with sights that would normally offer comfort and warmth. In Nicolas Roeg's hands, however, they become unsettling in a way that cannot be pinpointed or explained, an imperceptible dissonance that gradually creates discomfort. This mood carries through to the following scene, in which tranquil shots of a young girl, Christine, in a red coat playing by a pond are intercut with her brother riding on a bike nearby and her parents, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), working in the house.

Roeg sets up the scene with gliding camera movements and dives into and back out of cuts. It instantly establishes the movie as a gravity elevator, constantly sucked through the core, propelled back out and slowed by the pull until the camera begins to fall and start the process all over again. Reflective imagery inverts Christine, who is then warped further by a red-coated doppelganger seen in a slide John has of a Venetian cathedral he has been commissioned to restore. The vague intensity slowly building in these swooning movements and careful editing reaches its apex when the three separate but linked images run together: the boy runs over a pane of glass inexplicably on the ground and crashes his bike; the red-and-white ball Christine was playing with floating on the surface of the water as a stand in for the red-clad, white girl now dwelling under it; and John sensing something wrong when he spills some water on the image and the girl's Venetian "double" disappears in a thick streak of red. A suite of domestic horror, this opening scene captures the full feature in miniature and stands on its own as a complete action of mood, construction and tragic execution that would make for one of the greatest short films of all time if the movie stopped there.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

That Nicolas Roeg would make a science fiction film is less surprising than the perception among many that the director hadn't made one previously: Roeg's forte as a visual artist is his ability to make the familiar and pedestrian alien, abstract and atmospheric. Such an aesthetic serves him well in the story of an alien who lands on Earth seeking water to take back to his drought-stricken planet: through his eyes, the surreality of Roeg's vision of Earth looks even more bizarre.

But just as Roeg's other films exhibit flashes of science fiction-like shots in differing genres, so too does The Man Who Fell to Earth not fit neatly into one area. The initial plot of the alien come to gather water splinters almost immediately, and Roeg's film morphs into something more complex, baffling and, once you get into the groove, beautiful. Part paranoid thriller in the Alan J. Pakula model, part cynical love story and part scathing critique of materialist America, The Man Who Fell to Earth takes Roeg's pet theme of the communicative barriers we erect around ourselves to an extreme, focusing on a creature who first cannot understand our ways and subsequently doesn't want to after unlocking their mysteries.

And who better to play the role of an androgynous, aloof, egotistical alien than Ziggy Stardust himself, David Bowie? The harmony between player and part is so strong that one forgets that Roeg adapted a novel instead of writing the role specifically for the rocker, then trapped in the downward spiral of his cocaine addiction. The weight loss spurred by his addiction only makes the character of Thomas Jerome Newton look even stranger, a gaunt waif sporting a shock of orange hair that redirects focus at all times to Bowie wherever he is on the screen.

Yet if the predominant mood of Roeg's masterpiece, Walkabout, was nostalgia-flecked sadness, the atmosphere he conjures with this film is considerably more ironic. The opening credits play grainy shots of objects and beings traveling through space, yet they look almost pedestrian, as do later visions of the alien's family back home. Once the film properly begins, however, with Newton's spaceship crashing into a lake in the New Mexico, Roeg's vision of the world is crisp but oblique, scattershot and threatening. The director adds an amusing element to Newton's unfamiliarity with his surroundings by having the alien pose as a Brit, as if the Englishman Roeg cannot process modern America. You can almost see him clucking his tongue as he looks around his shooting locations, drawling to himself, "You turn your back for 200 years and the place goes mad."

Yet Thomas adapts quickly, not to the mannerisms of human interaction but something more important, at least in the views of society: he brings with him advanced technology, and he finds a patent lawyer as quickly as possible before launching enough "inventions" to establish a world conglomerate within months. Newton becomes a Howard Hughes character, his inexperience with humanity excused as eccentricity. His instantaneous success breaks up what could have been a straightforward plot, showing how a flash of cash answers all questions in America, and even an alien being can establish himself as a king. Soon, he's buying up major companies in his attempt to develop technology to take water back to his planet or to bring his people to Earth (the movie does not go into detail in such matters), but Newton stays in modest accommodations and, apart from the luxury of a phone in his car and a personal driver, does not exhibit any lavish habits. But that's the nature of major wealth: the rich don't spend their money, choosing only to sit on it, so no one questions his low-key life. At least the alien has a noble reason for saving his money.

Just as he did with Walkabout, Roeg builds an unsettling atmosphere through the constant juxtaposition of imagery. Here, he shows Newton's fears of this new world in primarily sexual terms: clearly unaccustomed to humanoid sex, he sits watching Japanese theater as actors engage in swordplay, which Roeg plays against shots of fuel technician and professor Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), who comes to play a major role in the film, bedding a number of his students. As Newton grows increasingly uncomfortable, the parallels between the acted violence and the playful sex grow until even the alien cannot take it anymore and leaves the club.

Both this vague fear of sex and Roeg's ironic, British evaluation of contemporary America combine when Newton checks into a small hotel on one of his business trips. The woman who takes his bags, Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), a mousy, awkward young woman, inadvertently causes Thomas extreme pain by insisting he ride the elevator -- in one of the film's many cruel twists, the being who traveled light years cannot stand any swift movement on Earth. Once the elevator finally stops, Mary-Lou summons a surprising amount of strength and carries Newton, bleeding and vomiting to his room.

Intrigued by her, Thomas slowly enters into an affair with Mary-Lou, and he learns about humanity through interaction with her. She takes Newton to church, introduces him to alcohol and teaches him a thing or two about sex. However, acclimating to humanity also teaches Newton about distracting pleasures like television and, yes, sex. Soon, the modest home he makes with Mary-Lou features a wall of TVs that the alien watches all at once, his concerns for his home planet drifting away in the face of convenience. After a point, he barely leaves the house; when he does, he often asks for the people he visits to turn on their TVs.

That is the portrait Roeg paints of modern America: a place where all concerns, all logic, all drive melts in the face of programmed pleasure. Thomas sits in front of his TV all day, his perpetual youth making him as plastic and false as the images that beam at him. Mary-Lou deals with his fading interest in her and the eventual revelation of his true nature through alcoholism and a warped sense of Christian values. "I lifted you up once," she intones upon seeing the alien's true form and deciding to stay with him, yet she never once questions the morality of sleeping with a married man (or alien). Bryce deals with his boredom at university by engaging in casual sex with students so young that half of them look upon his body and exclaim, "You don't look anything like my father!" When he heads to Newton's company, however, he places such interests aside, confiding in the audience that his "mind had a libido of its own." Yet once he discovers Newton's true nature and the government takes the alien away, Bryce returns to his old ways, his brief flash of motivation petered out in favor of the constant of nubile flesh.

Once the government does find out about Newton, the film shifts into yet new territory, taking on the feel of a classic paranoid thriller. State Department officials lock him in a fake apartment where they experiment upon him for years. Apart from a few exclamations of pain, however, Newton does not do anything to fight back, and he contents himself by requesting a TV and, occasionally, Mary-Lou. Interestingly, the government seems less concerned with studying an alien life form than they do breaking up the monopoly it built. Americans love wealth, but if one person gets all the money, he edges out the other big corporations; an aristocracy is acceptable, but not an aristocracy of one. "This is modern America," one official says to his colleagues, "and we're going to keep it that way." Their experiments, such as photographing Newton's eyes with X-rays, are perversely humanizing, sealing his humanoid contact lenses onto his eyes permanently as they hold him until his conglomerate can fully dissolve and become nothing but a distant memory in the public consciousness so they'll return to buying from Kodak, DuPont and the like.

Thus, Newton goes free, his mission long since abandoned with a final goodbye to his family via a vinyl record, a farewell that could apply equally to his apathy toward returning as it is to their doomed plight. Bowie takes to the final image of a broken alcoholic with disturbing ease: Newton would inform Bowie's Thin White Duke persona to appear on his next album, Station to Station, and a still from the film became the cover for his recovery album, Low. Seeing Newton distance himself from the universe in his single-minded devotion to television parallels Bowie's increasingly chaotic cocaine binge, which impeded his work and led to intense paranoia. And when he bows his head at the end, cut off from his booze, the fragile, hollowed man frozen over the credits hints at the artist's desperate cleansing of his Berlin period. Roeg couldn't have predicted these events, but the real-life parallels between the film and Bowie add yet another facet to a film that layers time and imagery into one bravura experiment, an assault on the mainstream with a lead performer who was as indicative of the issues of modern America as he was above them in his detached way.

Walkabout

A common refrain mentioned in reviews of immaculately shot films states, "You could take a frame of this movie and hang it in an art gallery." When you think about it, it's a silly rave, as cinema is just 24 photographs a second, and numerous photographs contain a painterly quality. Naturally, the films where this line can be most readily applied enjoy the contributions of cinematographers with the keenest sense of landscape and portrait photography. Ergo, the beauty of Walkabout should come as no surprise, given director/cinematographer Nicolas Roeg's involvement; case in point, this is the man as responsible, if not more so, for the look of David Lean's gorgeous epic Lawrence of Arabia as the film's actual cinematographer (Roeg was A.D.).

I say should, because not even a few glimpses of the film in online trailers could prepare me for the jaw-dropping, deeply atmospheric majesty of Roeg's natural compositions. The story of two schoolchildren abandoned in the Australian Outback, Walkabout emphasizes the harshness of the climate and its alien appearance to sheltered, city-dwelling children by heightening the reddish hue of the soil until the endless desert comes to resemble the Martian landscape, a light science fiction touch echoed when the frequency of the two kids' portable radio modulates in otherworldly tones over a shot of the Moon. Cleaned up for Criterion's restoration, the tone poetry of Walkabout's alternately beautiful and terrifying landscapes and carefully edited close-ups make a case not for hanging some of its frames in a museum -- and some shots, like those of an Aboriginal boy standing utterly immobile in front of a setting sun, could be in an instant -- but to show the entire thing in as many art galleries as possible, achieving its full power in the manner in which it is meant to be exhibited. After all, who would ever cut up a painting just because one section of it was so good it could be placed in its own exhibit?

The children, named Peter and Mary in James Vance Marshall's source novel but left nameless here, are first seen back in Sydney without a care in the world. They even swim in a pool located just off the bank of Port Jackson, as if choosing the chemical blue of their artificial bubble over Australia's natural water supply mere feet away. Their father, a geologist, looks on with a strange look on his face, and we know something is wrong. The next day, he takes the kids for a picnic out in the bush, where he suddenly snaps and shoots at his children before torching his car and committing suicide. The girl (Jenny Agutter) protects her younger brother (Roeg's son, Luc) from the truth, and the two move away from the vehicle, deeper into unforgiving terrain. After several days' worth of stumbling around searching for oases, the two find a Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on his walkabout. The young man does not speak English, and the white children do not know his language, but the three stick together, the Aborigine leading them through the Outback, seemingly just glad for the company.

From this simple setup comes a film that packs numerous meanings, many of them conflicting if not mutually exclusive, densely packing its trim 100 minutes -- and this is the unedited version -- with evocative editing, powerful imagery and minimal but devastating performances from all three young actors. The source novel is considered a children's classic in Australia, but Roeg reworks the material into a looser and much darker realm. Where the children of the book find themselves in the Outback after surviving a plane crash, the suicide of their father in the film creates a more shocking foundation for the kids' growth. Here, they need the Aborigine not simply for physical guidance back to their people but emotional and spiritual rehabilitation for their trauma.

Rather than shoot the Outback in flat, documentary-like framing, Roeg brings an improvisatory feel to his setting, filming whatever grabbed his fancy and editing together images of landscapes made vibrant and alive by heatwaves, broken up by shots of wildlife. Lizards skittering across the ground, bugs swarming over the carcasses of the creatures that did not survive the terrain, the tiny lifeforms that mingle with the humans and the larger mammals serve to make the Outback at once deathly tranquil and constantly teeming. Occasionally, Roeg and his team clearly saw something interesting and found themselves lacking the proper scope or film stock, but the resulting picture, distorted almost beyond recognition in heavy grain. Yet these shots are as gorgeous, in their way, as the crystalline extreme long shots and sudden, higher-quality zooms, and the various forms that the images take recast the Outback in a borderline surreal light. Indeed, the film that popped into my mind most often while watching Walkabout was The Night of the Hunter, another surreal fairy tale about children taking in a world much bigger and stranger than they can fully process while outrunning death (and another kid's film that's far too twisted for children).

As the two white children follow the lean, jovial black teen through the bush, Roeg gently brings to light the nascent sexuality of the older teens. Eyeline matches of the Aborigine checking out the girl's sun-scorched, sore legs with more than just friendly care and the girl ogling his sweat-glistened muscles plant wisps of desire in the minds of those who have never truly felt it before. Fittingly, the setting of Walkabout serves almost as an ironic visualization of the terror of sexual awakening, a barren wasteland where parents not up for the job of explaining the most crucial, confusing and frightening stage of physical and emotional development in a person's life abandon their kids to simply figure it out as best they can. When Agutter swims in a pond naked in the film's most famous sequence, her playful splashes are not simply a means of cooling off in the harsh desert but of flirtatious display to the Aborigine. (Unbeknown to her, the girl's brother sees her as well, perhaps setting off the first confused feelings that will root the eventual growth of hormones that currently ensnare the older children). Roeg further emphasizes the sexual nature of the film with cutaways to other groups of people in the Outback: a team of Western researchers looks for a downed weather balloon, or at least that was their assigned task. In reality, the men of the team ogle the lone female among them, trying so hard to peek down her lab coat that their heads practically sway with the wind-blown blouse. When the woman even adjusts in her seat, her nylons scratch against each other with hilariously deafening sound, causing the men to whip around and ignore everything else. Heck, even the music that the two city kids primarily receive on their radio is rock, the most blatantly sexual music around.

Yet Roeg introduces a larger, more complex and far more despairing theme of broken communication between people. The Aborigine and the white children can communicate basic ideas like "water" and "rest" through pantomime, but the two teenagers cannot confess their budding feelings for each other. Again, Roeg's asides function as thematic support rather than simple tangents: some of the men in the research team speak Italian and do not seem to contribute much to the English-speaking scientists. The three children later pass a small village where a white Australian essentially forces Aborigine children into slave labor. The people likely cannot understand him, and his falsely avuncular attitude belies a disregard for the natives. When his mistress arrives, he heads in to his home to bed her, and his actions with the white woman are as perfunctory and walled-off as his taskmaster behavior with the natives he "employs."

But Roeg does not simply suggest walls of communication between races or sexes. That is facile material for hack stand-up comedians. No, Roeg puts forward the dark notion that we are all locked into the parameters of our social programming. Rather than portray native society as noble and pure and European civilization as corrupt and arrogant, Roeg focuses on the traits all humans share, for better and worse. The Aboriginal boy spears an animal and clubs it to death, and before the audience can think to call his actions barbaric, the director intercuts shots of a white butcher back in the city casually chopping up meat with a cleaver. The Aborigine shows an amount of respect for his surroundings by eating what he kills, but he also engages in a fair amount of bloodsport, almost cheerily chasing around animals and killing them to prove his ability to dominate in the wild (and possibly impress his new companions). Only when white poachers blaze through in a jeep, casually firing on every animal in the vicinity and driving off as quickly as they arrived does the upbeat feeling of the boy's spree suddenly feel cold.

The sexual tension between the older boy and girl, of course, is the biggest indication of the subtle ways in which we are all connected, yet Roeg still fashions a film about people who cannot break through barriers that separate them, barriers that have nothing to do with language, as shown by the girl figuring out the Aboriginal word for "water." What separates them is their entire perception of the world, and because of that they can never be together. In the film's best, most stunningly shot and most heartbreaking sequence, the Aborigine attempts to communicate his love for the girl in the only way he knows how: a mating dance. As the girl walks through an abandoned barn, Roeg pulls the camera back and up to show the boy following parallel from behind a wall, occasionally slipping past windows and door frames. Finally, he dons tribal paint and engages in an intricate but mysterious dance, so focused that the confused girl fearfully rejects him without realizing his intentions. The next morning, the boy has hanged himself from a nearby tree. The book kills the native through a flu virus that the inoculated Western children carry but do not catch. A surprisingly open display of anti-imperialist sentiment, this ending has a touch of didacticism that Roeg eschews. In his vision, the boy is driven to despair by the epiphany that he cannot reach and touch someone who's standing right next to him. Perhaps that explains the father's explosion at the beginning: a geologist sent into the Outback to study it, he found only a place so vast and unique that it broke his conception of the world and took his sanity in the process.

One should not hunt too desperately for a clear meaning, however. To assign a flat reading to so open a visual poem would be reductive and counterproductive to the movie's atmospheric presentation. The combination of still landscapes and bustling shots of scuttling lifeforms allows Roeg to use the Outback as its own dimension, a place that isolates its travelers from the social ties that bind them before introducing a whole wave of creatures to force people into finding a more universal outlook; remember that Roeg often punctuates the action and emotion with a eerily perfect shot of nearby life matching what was just seen or felt. Unfortunately, humans lack the mental fortitude to survive such a reprogramming, so they either kill themselves or escape back to their previous lives.

Ergo, Roeg throws in a completely different perspective at the end that radically alters the perception of the film, that of nostalgia. The girl, grown up and married, has long since returned to Sydney and readjusted to "normal" life. But when her husband returns home and excitedly launches into boring details of his upcoming promotion in an uninteresting bureaucracy, she flashes back to her time in the wild, swimming naked with her brother and the boy.

This nostalgic remembrance obviously suggests that, for all the Outback's danger and all the tragedy it foisted upon her, it remains a symbol of freedom and uninhibited growth for the girl. The use of ethereal recordings of children's songs, both delicate and foreboding, throughout the kids' adventure in the Outback underscores this: these reworked nursery rhymes look to the past past even as these kids are being pushed permanently away from those simpler days into adulthood. What becomes clear in this penultimate scene, however, is that even adulthood is a false promise: truly great films about maturation cannot play to adolescents, because you can't understand what is to grow up until you've been through the ordeal yourself and figure out that adulthood is really no different than childhood. That's why the boy, who realized that his future was his past, killed himself in hopeless depression, while the girl can withstand this epiphany because she only understands the dark truth in retrospect. In a world comprising areas that have either been Westernized or ruined by Westernized nations, the untamed Outback of Walkabout may be the last place on Earth that can force us to confront this, and that's more terrifying than all the spiders, snakes and crocodiles that roam the area.