Don't Look Now... fate gifts me a trip to Venice.

Returning to Birmingham after a three week retreat in Berlin: city of creative inspiration, civic generosity, robust infrastructure and dark neighbourhoods. The grieving is not the leaving of Berlin but in the getting back home: the seemingly endless navigations of 5am starts, cryptic online check ins, hidden fees, lengthy stopovers, unmeasurable baggage allowances, the wasteful inconvenience of a printed boarding pass and the low key agony of the flight itself.

Hoping for a cheap, direct flight that had not yet been announced, I left booking the return journey to the 11th hour. On the eve of departure, there was just one affordable option: an eleven hour journey stopping over in Venice’s Marco Polo airport. A quick map check revealed this to be just outside the city, allowing me enough time for a whistle stop visit. What had seemed like a nightmare resolved into an unexpected (if brief) extra holiday.

What to do with five hours in Venice, that watery anti-Birmingham?

By chance, I had already had diarised a screening of Nic Roeg’s 1973 chiller Don’t Look Now on the day after my return, at Thimble Mill Lane Library’s film club, Bearwood. I should look for the various hotels, churches, canals and alley ways of that film (easy to find these online). I chose the church that John Baxter repairs a mosaic and the abandoned palace of the final scene where he finally meets the red coated figure who has been haunting the film’s periphery.

Venetian blind

Don’t Look Now may even be my favourite film (how do you decide?) A masterpiece of story telling, atmospheres and emotions and with such well-written, beautifully realised characters that the looseness and openness of its ultimate meaning prompts sustained efforts to resolve the mystery. Many films are mysterious; few lead to contemplation years after the film’s end. Each time I revisit the film, I focus on a different aspect: dialogue, themes, background nuances, looking for further clues. The film’s atmosphere comes to mind every time someone states: ‘more canals than Venice’ (while I counter: ‘but their canals are better!’) Any red duffle coat will do it— surely true of anyone who has seen the film. Anyone standing facing the wall, a stance borrowed by the Blair Witch. In Moseley, I walk past daily Julie Christie’s home from her days with Birmingham Old Rep. Her presence was felt while I was enrolled at Wolverhampton Art School, c1991, where my print tutor Don Bessant had been her pre-fame boyfriend. Christie’s later romantic partner was Brian Eno who I had just seen perform in Berlin (his watery and sinister ‘Julie With…’ is apparently about her). These strange connection always reveal themselves when you seek them out.

For me, the film’s underlying theme is one of inevitability: that the events of your life are unavoidable, unchangeable and (nearly) unguessable. The actions and fates of the characters are as certain as the film’s script; there’s no point hoping for a different ending, though you can certainly have a different reading each time. That said, the film is not quite the same as Daphne du Maurier’s short story, in which we don’t learn how the daughter dies (so, then, why Venice?) and in which it is Laura who wears the crimson coat, so the fate of that story is not fixed. In either version, fate is cast as the unseen—or glimpsed—monster: there is no where to run and it certainly is not your friend.

Accordingly, the free gift of the Venice trip, a day ahead of the screening, felt like an omen. I was unusually careful, packing everything the day before the flight, quadruple checking flight times, terminals, boarding passes and left luggage locations. I met a friend to hand back the Berlin apartment keys, referencing my heightened sensitivity to the world. Only once before, I told my friend, had I missed a flight and that was ten years ago, in Berlin. On that occasion, my passport had slipped out in a museum visited earlier in the day. I noticed its absence in the airport, three hours ahead of the flight, so chanced returning to the museum to collect the passport. Transport links were good, roads clear, the passport safe at reception, airport security was efficient but I still missed the gate closure by about ten minutes. Never again, I vowed. Even relating this horror story to Elvira did not prompt me to check I had my passport this time, which I did not. I handed over the keys, left to catch the airport schnell train, then realised the shocking loss. Enough time to chase Elvira and return to the apartment. My passport was there on the desk, along with my souvenir Eno ticket. Then a familiar Berlin dash to the airport, during which my phone fell to the cobbles, shattering the glass and permanently dislodging the SIM. I cleared security fifteen minutes after the gate had closed, yet somehow was still able to join the departing plane. This time, no one seemed to mind that I was late, though the whole episode felt like a warning.

Later, the Alps illusion: are those clouds below, or snow covered peaks?

Marco Polo to Venice was a quick bus journey and I now had five hours to explore at leisure; or rather to make it to the single destination I decided on, situated right on the other end of the city. It would be the crumbling grand arcades visited at the end of the film, the recently restored Museo di Palazzo Grimani. Then lunch in the nearby square of Santa Maria Formosa. The phone fall meant I had to save a series of maps as photos to chart the route, but it wasn’t anywhere detailed enough. In Venice, one cannot merely follow the canals in the way that’s true for Birmingham’s cuts. They are not a pedestrian’s navigation; they are there for Venice’s various floating bodies. After a mile of second guessing the route, seeing the impossibility, I bought a map for €2 and stashed the broken phone. Instantly Venice made sense. It had to be crossed with either a local’s knowledge or by alley by alley map checks. It was mild for November and still busy - though nothing like the peak season. Don’t Look Now is off peak: the Baxters’ hotel is getting ready for a dust-sheeted winter.

I stopped to rest every time I found myself in a square with seating - and like Birmingham that’s not all of them. However, unlike Birmingham, Venice’s squares are relentlessly beguiling. Venice is the anti-Birmingham: both are mediaeval cities but while B town has cautiously held on to a few elements of its Old Town, all of Venice is the Old Town, with a few cautious forays into the modern era. The lego fantasia of the Museo del Novecento is jarring in context, yet would be taken for a Travelodge if encountered in Centenary Square.

Finally I’m there, after an hour or more of scotomaic zig zags. The palace does not look familiar from the courtyard but then I see the opulent ceilings through the windows, their decaying grandeur being glimpsed through fog and shadows of the film’s denouement. I repair to the restaurant with the map, imagining I am awaiting the Baxters, now 50 years late. Here, I can see I needed to be on a different canal:, to approach—counterintuitively—the palace by water in order to recognise the scene. After tempura, a litre of sparkling water and a chat with the waiter (who hadn’t heard of Birmingham, even when I prompt him with Spaghetti Junction) I return and suddenly everything pops into focus. There is the line of boats that John Baxter has to climb over to get to the palace’s wrought iron gates. The same gates that he inexplicably closes and locks behind him. The steps, corridors, pediments and ceilings of that scene all then crystallise from the gate. Something else feels very close: the looming sense of cinematic history, the ripples that the film—that scene especially—had on moviegoers the world over, and for decades. It feels like the scene of a real event. What actually happened? Today I can go no further, and with dusk falling, I head back to Birmingham without incident, stopping to buy Venetian cioccolatini for the film club.

Better cuts than Brum

The Italian treats are received well; Viv of the film club wears her striped black and white top, like those worn by the gondoliers, while another member has a red hooded coat. Both deny these were conscious sartorial decisions. I wear red, but intentionally. Viewing the film for what might be the eighth time, I am now intimately familiar with the story and can focus on some of the supporting details, looking—like Detective Sabbione— for further clues, and the film is dense with them. This time I await the first spoken words, often significant in films whose impact lingers. These key words, wholly unexpectedly, come from Action Man, in a scene that I had not paid any attention to previously. Action Man is being transported in a wheelbarrow by the Baxters’ daughter Christine, as she plays in the fields around her home. The words spoken are radioed in by his superior, who speaks in a plummy female voice: ‘Action Man patrol: Open Fire. This is your commandant speaking. Mortar attack, dig in.’ Inside the house, the Baxters relax in front of a roaring fire, finding an answer to her daughter’s question about a pond’s water ‘nothing is as it seems, offers John. Cut back to Christine herself with the pull string Action Man, this time the commandant issues the chilling order: ‘Action Man patrol - fall in’. Only on later reflection can these words have meaning, and are the only line given to the film’s antagonist, being the powerful and malicious designer of fate, or fate itself. At the other end of the film, the crimson coated Goblin never speaks, only communicating a silent NO with a shake of her head. What, then, was the question? Perhaps it is any of those that have wrong-footed John up to this point, during his days in Venice. Or perhaps NO pre-empts any possible questions or explanations that John, Laura or anyone else involved in the film, including Action Man, Daphne, Nic and Viv, and you, could have.