Don’t Look Now tells the story of a married couple, John and Laura Baxter, in the wake of the accidental drowning of their young daughter, and who are now in a bleak, out-of-season Venice where John is helping to restore an old church as the pair attempt to piece together their shattered lives. They meet a blind psychic who claims to be in contact with their dead daughter and who has dark forebodings about what Venice holds in store for John – at a time when the city is plagued by a series of mysterious killings.
Classification Issues
- Violence
- There is brief sight of a man being slashed in the side of the neck with a large knife. There is some focus on blood pumping out of the wound and pooling around his head.
- Sex
- There is a long sex scene between a husband and wife, which shows them in various sexual positions.
Cinema classification
British director Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 supernatural mystery-drama, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier and starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, provides an interesting picture of changes in attitudes towards the classification of sex in films.
The work was first submitted on film to the BBFC in 1973 and was given an X certificate (the equivalent to today’s 18).
The film’s classification was influenced by several factors, including its ‘occult’ themes, repeated disturbing images of the daughter’s drowning, a scene of strong violence near the end, but most significantly, a strong sex scene.
The BBFC concluded that whilst the sex scene’s length – lasting for around five minutes – and explicit nature (including extensive breast and buttock nudity) went beyond what it had passed previously, there was no reason to intervene at the adult category.
The view at the time was that the scene was not comprised entirely of sexual mechanics as Roeg (in a characteristic bout of ‘playing with time’) continually cuts away from the sex to sequences of John and Laura after their lovemaking as they variously get dressed, apply make-up, take a pre-dinner drink and finally leave the room for an evening out. This creates a context for the sex as something natural that has happened between a married couple signalling their attempt to return to some kind of normality after the tragedy they have suffered.
The film proceeded to garner considerable critical acclaim and to establish Roeg’s reputation as an imaginative and challenging filmmaker.
Video classification
The work was next submitted to the BBFC in 1988 for a video classification.
By this time, the 15 category was in place having been introduced in 1982, and serious consideration was given to lowering the film’s category on video with due account taken of the contextual arguments for the sex scene.
However, several factors influenced the decision to issue an 18 rating. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had cut the scene in the USA, and the work was being assessed three years after the passing of the Video Recordings Act in 1984 (bringing video works into the same regulatory framework as films), which contributed to a cautious approach toward making strong depictions of sexual activity accessible to teenagers.
Reclassification at 15
The film was resubmitted to the BBFC in 2001 for a modern theatrical classification, by which time there had been a significant change in the BBFC’s engagement with the public.
In 2000, a new version of the BBFC’s Classification Guidelines was published, outlining the criteria on which its decisions were based. Crucially, these were a product of very extensive public consultation, a process which had informed the BBFC (amongst other things) that a significant proportion of adults were more relaxed about the portrayal of sex at 15, especially when it was seen in the context of loving and developing relationships.
The Guidelines stated that, at 15, “sexual activity and nudity may be portrayed but without strong detail”. With that in mind, the contextual arguments for the sex scene in Don’t Look Now could be considered afresh: it was a picture of a loving relationship and part of a healing process for the couple; the cutting away to non-sexual activity during the scene avoided a gratuitous focus on mechanistic sex; and the lack of genital exposure meant that that there was no ‘strong detail’.
In the light of the public’s own inclinations, the BBFC found these compelling arguments for the film to be given a lower category, although the sex scene was still regarded as sufficiently ‘borderline’ for the work to require scrutiny by the BBFC’s Presidents before finally being passed at 15, without cuts.
In 2002, a video version was submitted and classified at the same category.
