More deaths in Venice: Some good reasons to resurrect Don't Look Now

Nicholas Roeg's 1973 Don't Look Now is a little dated of course but still a movie well worth watching for its highlights and for its overall mood of creepiness. Briefly, it's a story (based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, which maybe I ought to read) about a 30ish husband and wife - Donald Sutherland, looking hilarious today in 70s era window-pane business suits and cravats and abundant hair, and Julie Christie, looking gorgeous as always - whose young daughter drowns; during their mourning, they move to Venice for a winter, as Sutherland works on the restoration of a church, which has been pretty much eaten alive by acidity in the air, as he notes. Christie encounters two British sisters, one of whom is blind and claims to have psychic powers - in fact, within the logic of the movie, she does have psychic powers, as she conjures visions of the dead child, whom she says is warning them to leave Venice. Sutherland also has psychic powers of some sort - a series of warnings that come to him as visions. Sutherland begins to follow a ghostly image whom or which he suspects to be the ghost of the daughter, and he comes to no good end. So, pretty simple ghost story, with a bit of a serial-killer angle thrown in for good measure, but if you don't believe in spirits who will have to suspend your disbelief in order to buy into this plot. Yet even if you don't buy into it, Roeg brings so many great scenes along the way that the film is worth resurrecting: the great scenes of Sutherland pulling his daughter from the pond, Christie's first encounter with the blind sister, her fainting in the restaurant, a very intense and erotic sex scene between Christie and Sutherland far advanced for its day or even for today, the accident in the church, the final encounter with the red-cloaked image, and most of all for the many excellent on-location scenes in a wintry Venice - anyone whose been there will understand the anxiety about getting lost on those beautiful and confusing streets, especially at night. The city looks a little more down-at-heels than it does today, and much less crowded - though granted these are winter scenes under crowd control - all the main tourist sites are avoided and we just see the tiny bridges on the ordinary neighborhoods, not the lovely little passageways but the bustling Grand Canal, all of which in my view are far more beautiful and mysterious than the monumental structures, anyway.