We will see the red figure more often than he does, glimpsing it on a distant bridge, or as a boat passes behind two arches. In Venice, Baxter will get glimpses of a little figure in red running away from him or hiding from him, and may wonder if this is the ghost of his daughter. The shiny red raincoat will be a connector all the way through. Christine’s death by water will lead in an obscure way to Venice, where John Baxter is restoring an old church, where a killer is loose, where the police pull a body from a canal, where a child’s doll lies drowned at the water’s edge. There will be sharp intakes of psychic foresight. There will be shots that occur out of time, as characters anticipate future events, or impose past events on the present. This sequence not only establishes the loss that devastates the Baxters, but sets the visual themes of the movie. Something causes John to look up, and then run from the house, and then find his daughter’s body beneath the water and lift it up with an animal cry of grief. Shots show Christine’s raincoat reflected upside down in the pond. Her father spills a glass, and a blood-like stain spreads across the surface of a slide-a slide showing the red hood of a raincoat in a Venetian church. Her father looks up sharply, as if sensing the sound. Her brother runs his bicycle over a pane of glass, breaking it. Inside, her father studies slides of Venetian churches. The little girl Christine, wearing a shiny red raincoat, plays near a pond. There is never a moment when this scene in the British countryside seems safe or serene. It opens in the country cottage of John and Laura Baxter ( Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), who are curled up before the fire, working, while their children play outside. The movie takes place entirely on late autumn days when everything is grey and damp and on the edge of frost.
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