Death, corruption and humiliation: the dark side of Venice

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.

This is a supremely creepy and offbeat film that skirts the line between macabre thriller and psychodrama about grief. Watching it does nothing at all to make you want to visit the city in which it is set.

There are many other movies in different genres (literary adaptations, crime thrillers and biopics among them) in which the Venetian scenes have the same miasmatic atmosphere.

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“You turn and take a right and then you turn and take a right,” the hotel concierge tells the British couple, Colin and Mary (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson), early in Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers (1990). The remark sums up perfectly the baffling, maze-like quality of the city. The couple try to follow the concierge’s instructions but quickly end up hopelessly disoriented. When they are tired and vulnerable, the sleek but malevolent local, Robert (Christopher Walken), in his white Armani suit, sidles his way into their lives with predictably lethal consequences.

Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1971) may boast gorgeous production design but it shows a city in the grip of disease. Its lead character, the composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), has an unwholesome obsession with a teenage boy. Warner Bros were bewildered by the film. As Bogarde wrote in a letter (quoted in John Coldstream’s biography of the actor), the Hollywood studio had no idea “how to sell a movie about ‘this old fag who digs kiddies’”. At least, Tadzio, the handsome adolescent, looks healthy. That is more than can be said for the Venetians shown in the movie suffering from cholera – and whose plight the authorities are desperate to keep hidden from the tourists.

Federico Fellini’s Casanova (1976), starring Donald Sutherland in his second major Venice movie, offers an equally ambivalent view of the city built on water. It is here that Casanova is arrested and imprisoned for debauchery after a very acrobatic sex scene, involving a woman dressed as a nun. As portrayed by Fellini, Venice’s masked carnivals resemble grotesque satanic rituals in Dennis Wheatley novels. The revelry is strangely stylised and sinister.

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Venice hosts the oldest and grandest film festival in the world, established under Mussolini in 1932. The Venice festival features in Joseph Losey’s Eva (1962), a film about jealousy and sexual humiliation in which a hulking Welsh writer (Stanley Baker) is reduced to a quivering, paranoid wreck by the seductive Eva (Jeanne Moreau).

Even politely spoken Henry James adaptations of the 1990s such as Iain Softley’s The Wings of a Dove (1997) associate Venice with romantic betrayal and terminal illness. Helena Bonham Carter and Linus Roach play the cash-strapped British lovers who plot to fleece a beautiful American heiress suffering from some unspecified disease. This is a costume drama that is far bleaker and more unsettling than its beautiful locations initially make it seem.

The various Shakespeare adaptations that have been set or shot in the city, for example, Orson Welles’ Othello (1951) or Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004), starring Al Pacino as Shylock, are likewise very morbid affairs.

It is no surprise that the psychopathic Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), ends up in Venice after assuming the identity of his “friend” Dickie (Jude Law), whom he has murdered, in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). It’s the perfect city for him. In Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game (2002), in which John Malkovich played Ripley, the killer has taken up residence in the Venice region. You could hardly imagine him living anywhere else.

Not every movie set in Venice wallows in death, disease and decay. However, films that present a rosy vision of the city tend to be far less powerful than those that explore its darker side. Singing gondoliers don’t have the impact of grotesque dwarves brandishing meat cleavers. Woody Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996), partly set in the city, is rarely revived today. Katharine Hepburn had one of her most famous comic scenes walking backwards into the canal as the middle-aged American in David Lean’s Summertime (1955), but when Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck partly set his romantic thriller The Tourist (2010), starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, in Venice, the reviewers all grumbled that it was too light and too sweet. “In my head, I thought of it as a group of critics coming to a restaurant. They thought they had ordered a main course and I served them dessert. Even so, I had put so much love into this dessert, it (the reaction) was that this is a terrible main course,” the chastened German director later reflected on the film’s failure to find an audience.

It is instructive to compare two James Bond movies that alighted in Venice. Moonraker (1979) has a chase with Roger Moore in a motor-powered gondola being pursued by speedboats. It was fun in its way but very cheesy – and features an idiotic sequence in which the gondola comes off the water and speeds through the throngs of tourists in St Mark’s Square. Better by far was the darker and more melodramatic shootout at the end of Casino Royale (2006) in which Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), drowns in front of Daniel Craig’s Bond when a building collapses into the Grand Canal.

Sean Connery’s Bond turned up in Venice in time for the end credits of From Russia With Love (1963), kissing Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) in a gondola on the Grand Canal – but this was just a token visit. The same could be said for Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989).

The often macabre representations of the city on screen clearly aren’t putting the tourists off. Around 30 million of them still visit the city each year. As they descend in their hordes on Marco Polo airport, they’re not thinking of cholera outbreaks or serial killers or worrying that Venice might soon sink. After so many movies, the question now is how filmmakers can show Venice in an original light. The one type of film we haven’t yet seen is an Irwin Allen-style disaster picture – but if those cruise ships and ocean liners keep on crashing into the city, it is a fair bet we will have one soon.

The restored 4K version of ‘Don’t Look Now’ will be released in cinemas by Studiocanal on 5 July, and on DVD, Blu-ray, EST and in a collector’s edition on 29 July