Furthermore, the way that Roeg portrays Christine’s death introduces a vague idea of misadventure. When I first saw the film it did not occur to me that Christine’s death could be anything more than an accident; however, after further viewings I started to consider that Roeg has left a kind of ambiguity to the first scene. The amount of symbolism contained within that first scene, with the elements of premonition and the supernatural, means that there is a possibility that Roeg was trying to suggest to the viewer that there was more to the accident than meets the eye and to illustrate the inevitability of fate. The first scene is a furious montage of images, which reinforce, alter and corrupt what has gone before. There are a few occasions where it seems as though John is expecting something to happen – his attention is elsewhere and he looks puzzled and concerned. Then there is the constant image of a figure in a red coat – both Christine and the figure in the slides. The fact that the figure has found it’s way onto the slide lends itself to the idea of horror. In the same way that Freddie Kruger is able to get into people’s dreams and thus kill them, the suspicion that somehow the red figure is responsible for Christine’s death is raised.
To add to this, when the water spills onto the slide, the shape that it makes both resembles blood and the image of Christine in John’s arms. In this there are the intertwined ideas that, first, the spillage on the slide indicates or pre-empts what is about to happen to Christine and second, that for John at least, Christine and the red figure (who, we later find, is the murderous dwarf) are the same – they both signify death for him. It is as though the dwarf is Christine avenging her death – John effectively (in his mind) has killed Christine and the figure, who represents Christine, kills him. There is a neatness about this circle of ideas that becomes evident only when the film is studied in detail.
There is also the way in which Roeg interlaces the audio from one scene with the visual from another; hence we get the sound of the mirror smashing under Johnny’s bike but the visual of John looking up from his work, or the audio of John saying “Oh shit, oh” and a glass smashing while seeing Christine’s ball falling in the water. These things happen so fast that we do not have time to consider them in detail and so just accept that they are linked. But this needs careful thought – are they actually linked? When John looks up is it because of psychic premonition or is it Roeg trying to trick us into believing something that is not there? After all, we are warned time and again to mistrust what we are told.
An interesting difference between the film and the story is the way that Roeg changes the colour of Laura’s coat from scarlet to blue. In the story, there is a distinct lack of colour, which lends to Venice a drabness and dullness totally different to the film, where Venice is a gothic masterpiece, beautiful and terrifying in turn. There are very few colours mentioned in the story (red, grey and blue), and red is shown to be positive, unlike in the film where it is negative and predominant. In the story red is associated with Laura due to the emphasis of her coat as red. The colour red also brings back a happy memory for John: “...the little red house where d’Annunzio lived, with it’s garden – our house Laura called it, pretending it was theirs”. Red is the only colour that is noticeable in the story and maybe this is why Roeg chose to make such an icon of it in his film? Whatever the reason, its role in the film as a colour denoting trouble works much better in its imagery than it does in the story.
Throughout the film, Roeg seems to be using red and blue, and the contrast between them, to send us messages about who to trust, and when. Red is a lot more visible than blue, but when blue is used it is when Roeg is trying to indicate that things, or people, are ‘safe’. In the first scene, Laura wears a blue jumper and Christine wears her red coat, as does the dwarf in the slide. Christine’s ball is red and white striped and John has a packet of cigarettes that are red and white striped. Later in the film, when John and Laura are in Venice they are often surrounded by blue in the backgrounds or by people wearing blue; at the church many of the builders wear blue shirts and trousers, Laura often wears blue clothes, in the wardrobe at their hotel hang many of John’s blue shirts, the walls in their room and their headboard are blue, as is Laura’s nightdress. However, when we see Wendy and Heather’s bedroom we instantly notice red. Heather wears a red waistcoat and holds a red napkin. Bishop Barbarrigo is often placed with red somewhere around him; for example, when John goes to visit him the room is split into two sides: on one side (furthest away from the bishop) the wall and carpet are blue, and later, the window appears blue, nearer the bishop however, are many red objects; in the background is a glass case containing robes which has a red background, a red book lies in the table, the bishop wears a red cap and sits on a red-backed chair and the priest next to him has a red cumber band. This technique is also used earlier between the Bishop and John, at the church, when the blue is always closest to John and the red to the Bishop.
These two colours appear so many times through the film that it is impossible to believe that they could be coincidence and what starts to happen as the film progresses is that the subliminal messaging takes root in the mind and we start to believe in it . Later in the film, when the sisters are shown to be trust-worthy, they are thus shown more often with blue somewhere around them. The most noticeable example of this is when we see Heather in the police cell: she is filmed from below and is bathed in a bluish light while the rest of the cell is in darkness. The image is almost holy and brings to mind images of the Virgin Mary, who is always depicted in blue robes. By changing the original colours of the coats, Roeg enables himself (and us) to have colour as a distinct pointer to what is taking place within the narrative.
The next scene of immediate interest is the one that takes place at the restaurant. There are a few differences between the film and the text but the basic story is the same. The film contains much more symbolism in this scene than the book and the general tone is completely different – in the text there is an easy atmosphere between Laura and John, and it is difficult to discern what it wrong (we do not find out that their daughter has died for two pages). The film contains a lot more built up tension, where the audience waits on a knife-edge for something awful to happen. The scene starts with John and Laura chatting about their day and John complains about his job (unlike the book, where they are on holiday, in the film John is there to work). He tells Laura that he is restoring a fake and he cannot change his course. This is another of the throwaway lines in the film that goes by unnoticed until the film is actually studied and then it gains more significance. Once again the idea of reality and truth, versus illusion and lies, is highlighted and the fact we cannot change fate no matter what we do. Later in the film, despite warnings from the sisters to leave Venice for fear of danger, he cannot alter what is to happen. Roeg constantly enforces the idea that fate cannot be escaped.
The most interesting aspect of this scene is the use of mirrors. From the moment Laura goes into the toilette to help Wendy and Heather, we struggle to see the real people and are constantly bombarded with reflections of them. Over and over again we are confronted by reflections and half reflections so that we never see their whole face clearly and struggle to find the real perspective. Mirrors are mysterious and unreal – they give us insight into another world, a world that we can see but not touch. They show us what appears to be real but it is a distorted reality. The mirrors are like a metaphor for the film: illusion makes us believe what is false. We may think that we are seeing Laura or Wendy or Heather but the reflections of them are not the real people; we do not see their eyes or the emotions on their faces. This scene has a distinct air of menace, with the viewer unsure who to trust. There is also the possibility that Roeg is trying to make a point by framing Laura with a gilt mirror – there is the idea of Laura being contained within her own guilt so that we never get to see the real her. She is merely a reflection of who she used to be.
Du Maurier does not use anywhere near the same amount of symbolism as Roeg, however, the symbolism which he does use is taken from Du Maurier’s original text and then built upon. She introduces the idea of the inevitability of fate a few times, in a much more subtle way than Roeg. Most of the time the ideas are just simple lines, easy to miss unless you are specifically looking for them: “a flick of the coin between this, Torcello, and driving to Padua, and we had to choose Torcello” and “Why, in the name of hell, should they have picked on this particular spot, in the whole of Venice” illustrate that there is the possibility that there are things working against John and Laura in Venice. Du Maurier does not make a big deal about it and leaves it to the reader to pick up on but there are clues that she believes that fate cannot be fought against.
Roeg takes the ideas and themes of Du Maurier’s text and both builds upon them and turns them upside down. The result is that we have two very different versions of what is essentially the same story. Roeg’s film starts to gain a life of it’s own in the audience’s mind – it is a film that once seen is not forgotten due to the startling images it leaves. However, at times it sinks into farce: Roeg overreaches himself and the symbolism and attitude of melodrama start to become laughable. Du Maurier is much better at subtly creating a sense of paranoia and danger that might be real or might not. She leaves the reader with a sense of ambiguity that Roeg, in his eagerness to pinpoint his themes, thus misses, not realising that sometimes ambiguity and the fear of the unknown, can be much more frightening than reality.
