The original short story by Daphne Du Maurier was published in her 1971 collection Not After Midnight, and Other Stories and was subsequently adapted into the 1973 thriller of the same title by Nicolas Roeg, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie playing the couple John and Laura.
At about fifty pages, the short story is quite shortish and is written pretty straight-forwardly, no frills and all. John and Laura have two children: golden child Christine, who dies of meningitis, and little Johnny who attends prep school in the UK and needs to deal with the death of his sister all on his own while his parents make an extravagant trip to Venice to mourn her. Laura is definitely more affected by Christine's death and John does his best to cheer her up and help her get over her trauma, which includes making fun of old unassuming women who mind their own business eating in restaurants, making up stories about how they are actually men in drag or international spies. When Laura runs after one of the twin sisters to the restrooms to find out whether she wears a wig or not, she is told by the older woman that she's a psychic and she saw Christine, who is pretty happy on the other side.
Finding fresh joy in this news, Laura is again able to build intimacy with her husband, but keeps on looking for ways to find the twin sisters, so it's a false kind of joy which depends on the assumption Christine is there with them. But she's dead, in reality, and John is annoyed by these ladies feeding his wife false hope. Plus they claim that John is a psychic himself and has the second sight, but needs to leave Venice as soon as possible, which he won't have. Wandering around Venice he thinks he sees a child in the night, but dismisses the thought.
Laura needs to suddenly return to England because of an emergency. John causes major chaos by raising all Venetian hell and the police because he thinks he saw Laura together with the twins on a water bus. It is impossible though, his wife is on her way to England and the twins have been in a completely different part of the city, so he feels confused and puzzled about what's going on.
He again sees a child running around the canals of Venice and decides to follow her, but reaching an impasse he realizes it's not a child at all, but an older woman with dwarfism. Expecting a child, he is stunned by her older face and gray hair and the woman seizes the opportunity to ram a knife into his throat.
John realizes that his seeing his wife was a vision of the future, in which his wife and the twins are being taken to his funeral.
The short story ends with the wonderful and, let's face it, epic last lines; 'Oh God', he thought, 'what a bloody silly way to die...'
Nicolas Roeg's film adaptation keeps the basic outline of the story of grieving parents in Venice leading to the husband dying in the hands of a serial killer who happens to be a little person, but adds some elements to spice it all up some.
First off, Christine does not die a boring death from meningitis, but tragically drowns in their backyard lake while playing with her brother, and it is up to John to fish her out of deathly waters and shout and cry and howl in pain, quite theatrically if you ask me.
This motive of water will "flow" its way throughout the whole movie, with John constantly being reminded of this moment when he wanders along the canals of Venice, seeing a broken doll floating in the water, the dead body of a young woman being retrieved (since there is a serial killer wandering around) or when it is raining heavily.
While the book almost completely focuses on Laura's grief and John is merely there to console her and restore their former intimacy, John played by Sutherland is a broken man himself, mainly because of him finding the body of his dead child, and he is very much trying to cope with his own PTSD, as well as support his wife.
John's growing confusion and the foreboding atmosphere, merely conveyed by the psychic twins in the book, are reinforced with various numinous and occultist elements here, such as John being in Venice for a restoration job of an old church (an echo of other things he is trying to restore) and the spiritual talk with the priest in this church, but also the sisters, who are not twins in the movie, having some kind of occult connection. This certainly lends some much needed depth to John's character, plus I personally liked Film Laura better than Book Laura, because Film Laura doesn't make fun of unassuming people, she makes their acquaintance while trying to help one of them get something out of her eye.
There's also the added aspect of little Johnnie, who, in the book is basically being ignored and just used as a plot element to get Laura out of Venice, while in the movie there's the hint of a resentment that Adult John feels towards Child Johnnie, probably because he was playing with Christine before she died and basically didn't save her, who knows? There are interpretations of the movie that Johnnie even caused the death of Christine, since she was already dead when John ran to her rescue and the boy was just standing there watching passively. But that's a bold assumption, isn't it? Still, it would certainly explain why a little child is so blatantly neglected.
To shift the red coat from Laura wearing it in the book, to Christine wearing it the day she died and later the serial killer wearing it in Venice as an image easy to recognize, is another good choice on the director's part and strengthens the associative character marked by recurring motives such as water, colors and shattered glass.
The movie ends on a somewhat confusing note, though the plot is identical to the book. The final chase scene and the preceding incidents becoming more and more fever dreamy what with Laura being back in Venice all of a sudden and flashes to the blind sister (did I mention one of them is blind?) having an epiphanic seizure, and actually seeing the little person and her evil grin leave the viewer in a somewhat grim mood, much more suitable to a horror themed narration than the lighthearted "silly" way to go the short story offers.
Finally there is the serial killer and her abruptly killing John. Well, what can I say, it was the seventies and the sensibilities to diverse body shapes weren't the same as today. The little person is used as a parody of a child, her being considerably older is the shattering of not only John's hope of seeing his daughter once again, but a crass contrast to youth and innocence, the face of a murderer disguised as a child, but then again, she isn't really disguised, is she? It's the way she is.
My final verdict: Both works work as explorations of grief and intimacy and have a shock ending. The intricately added details as to John's character and the possibilities of a more complicated back story in the movie provide something to chew on, and the excellent use of visuals elevate the film to being the superior work in this case, making the short story seem a little underdeveloped. The movie wins this one!
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