Death, corruption and humiliation: the dark side of Venice

Inside Film: On screen, the picturesque canal city is portrayed as an eerie, decaying metropolis

Donald Sutherland as the grieving father in ‘Don’t Look Now’ (Studiocanal)

It may be a beautiful city, swarmed by tourists, bursting with art and listed as a Unesco World Heritage site, but for filmmakers, Venice has always had a very morbid attraction. In movie after movie, it is associated with death, corruption or romantic betrayal and sexual humiliation. It’s a metropolis that is sinking and decaying, where visitors invariably get lost figuratively and literally.

The re-release (on 5 July) of Nic Roeg’s masterpiece, Don’t Look Now (1973), is a reminder of just how oppressive the city so often seems on screen. While others rhapsodised about the churches and the paintings in Venice, Roeg in interviews would talk about the putrid smell that wafted over the Venice lagoon. He deliberately shot the film out of season. “Winters are really quite grim in Venice. There is a sense of isolation, of its separateness,” the director later reflected. He talked of the city’s “eeriness, its strangeness, its sense of doom”.

Although Roeg shows familiar landmarks and shoots in churches and on canals, Don’t Look Now is a very long way removed from the Baedeker Guide vision of Venice. Its protagonists, the bereaved couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland), getting over the drowning of their daughter, endure a series of ever more uncanny and disturbing experiences in Venice (where the husband has come to work). He keeps on thinking he is seeing his daughter in her familiar red anorak disappearing down alleyways. The reason the red jacket sticks out so garishly is that the colours are otherwise so muted. A serial killer is on the prowl. A blind medium claims to have contact with the dead child.