Part of Hoop-Tober

“The churches belong to God, but he doesn’t seem to care about them. Does he have other priorities? We have stopped listening.”

Denial

The little girl in the red coat ran down the Venetian alleyway. She ducked around a corner and out of view. She...she couldn’t be Christine (Sharon Williams), could she? Christine had been dead for...how long had it been? It hardly mattered. She had always been dead. She had always been right next to them. Laughing and smiling in her little red coat, lungs filling with water like the canals, submerging like the buildings of this sinking Italian ruin.

But Heather (Hilary Mason) sees her. She has the second sight. She and Wendy (Clelia Matania) always stare, frightful starers they are. Comes from living in the country. Through her beclouded eyes, Heather stares and sees Christine. She wants them to know that she’s happy, that she’s alright. Christine can’t be dead. Her spirit abides, imploring forward motion. Her continued life is a comfort to her mother, Laura (Julie Christie). Laura glows—renewed motherhood, even if only a mirage, has given her renewed life.

John (Donald Sutherland) cannot believe. Clairvoyance is nonsense, every bit as much as the Catholicism practiced in the cathedral that he is restoring. No one comes back from the grave. But his denial is laced with counterdenial. Nothing is what it seems, he muses, be it the curvature of a frozen lake or the intuition that led him to run outside, out to the pond, out to the limp pile of blond hair and red mack floating motionless. If the little girl in the red coat isn’t Christine, which she seems to be…then what?

Anger

The little girl in the red coat, so vibrant against the frost and earth tones, like a knife gash on a cold man’s throat. So much anger in her wake. John plays the even-keeled, rational gentleman, but his hostility leaks out, dotting the landscape in crimson. He screams at Laura. Christine is dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead! No amount of hocus pocus will change it. He sublimates his anger in his discussions with Police Inspector Longhi (Renato Scarpa) and his interrogation of the hotel super, but it seeps out around the edges as he looks for Laura and the English sisters who have bewitched her.

This latent enmity manifests itself everywhere. Red sweaters, red knit caps, red signs studding the brown and grey buildings decaying around them. Venice, the once-great city, gateway of trade, naval power, artistic hub, now subsiding into the sea. A deserted relic thrashing sadly against its inevitable decline. Venice no more deserves to pass away than Christine, no more deserves its crumbling edifice than Laura and John. And there are reports of a killer on the loose, undeserving victims, bodies being pulled from the water—a reminder of things past, alternately chilling and boiling the blood. Another patch of red, a lash on the back of a world that has turned away.

Bargaining

The little girl in the red coat wants them to leave. She is there to warn them, to warn her father of the grave danger in which he finds himself. Please, she beseeches through Heather, please don’t go down the darkened alleys and across the grotty bridges. Please, she pleads, leave this drowning place and seek higher ground.

Laura agrees, begging John to take a leave of absence from his work, while John begs Laura to let go of the past. Each gropes fumblingly toward a restoration—Laura of a restoration to the past, to happiness in the English countryside with their daughter by their side, if only in spirit; John of the restoration of a fake, like the windows and mosaics in St. Nicholas’ cathedral, of a world that looks like the past but excises its most harrowing memories. And yet he keeps seeing the little girl in the red coat, just like Heather. Christine cannot come back and yet she will not leave. There seems to be no negotiation with a ghost.

Depression

The little girl in the red coat is gone, but her specter remains, like the wintry fog enshrouding the city. The children belong to God, but when they drown it seems he doesn’t care about them. Why bother going on in the face of such cruelty? Why bother restoring a shrine to a deity who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make you whole? Perhaps he has other priorities, but when cradling a little girl’s lifeless body, it’s hard to imagine what those might be.

Depression is a helix, trapping you in the conviction of your hopelessness, a delusion that in turn leads to self-destructive actions whose consequences affirm that lack of hope. It spirals downward, downward, under the water, cutting off the oxygen. It chokes off the words; they can’t matter anyway.

For Laura, the thought of the paranormal eases the heavy emptiness of her world. She chooses not to avoid the pain but to push through it, as she must. The death of Christine’s body need not extinguish her soul. Laura is unsure whether she believes in a God who would take her daughter, but there is comfort in Christine’s spiritual persistence. Laura can smile again.

But for John, the world is much more muddled. He sees things that confuse and sadden him. Laura on a funeral barge. A doll floating in the water. The little girl in the red coat, again and again. He mimes composure, but he exists in a depressive shroud so thick he cannot see. He is like Venice, a man in aspic, all of his senses dead and gone but struggling to resurface.

Acceptance

The little girl in the red coat is there once more, running down the Venetian alleyway, ducking around the corner and out of view. Perhaps Heather is right, perhaps it is Christine. Perhaps John does share Heather's gift. Perhaps he should follow it. But Heather said Christine came to deliver a warning—if so, why would she run away?

With more energy than he’s had in ages, John dashes along the bridges, through the tunnels, down shadowy corridors with footsteps echoing. Laura follows, but cannot find him—they are separated by their acceptance of different fates. Embracing her new reality—a mixture of happy memories behind and a happy future ahead—Laura’s openness to the world has brought her closure. John, lost in a thicket of denial and anger and depression, follows an impulse he doesn’t understand toward an ending he cannot imagine. He cannot accept a world without Christine, despite his vocal insistence to the contrary, and so he chases an apparition.

Now he belongs to the little girl in the red coat. But she doesn’t seem to care about him. She has other priorities, meting out closure of a different kind. Chasing an echo of the past always leads to a dead end. If only he had been looking ahead. If only he had been listening.