A Venezia…un dicembre rosso Shocking (don't look now)

“In the 1970s, Nicholas Roeg shot a horror-thriller film using Venice based on the background of an Anglo-Saxon culture that, unlike ours, has always seen the city as an insidious and disturbing place.” This is how Gianandrea Barreca and Giovanni La Varra, guest curators of MDFF 2020-2021, introduce one of the films chosen for their section “Ciak in Italy. Foreign directors in the Italian landscape.” They highlight a view that even the city councillors of the time feared, for concern about the possible negative influence that the sinister atmosphere would have on tourists, even though it was filmed in places off the beaten path of the usual routes. The story? Actually, distant from the standards of ‘romantic’ Venice. In the city on the lagoon, the intense English couple, played by Donald Sutherland and Hilary Mason, experience – as the famous Morandini put it – a macabre ruination.