Bad Timing (1980)

I saw this originally sometime in the mid eighties and thought it was good. Now I appreciate it as a modern great. It doesn't date at all despite Garfunkle's hair and suits. Roeg tells a fairly simple story about complex emotions effecting complicated people and is well served by it's main protagonists and the actors he tasked to play them. The film is well paced and shown in non-linear interludes holding the viewer suspended, picking sides in a relationship and wondering about the consequences which are not fully revealed until the end. The style is typical of the director but that is no bad thing and if you want your cinema provocative and intelligently emotional this is a film you will want to see.

Nicolas Roeg anatomises a love affair, and then re-arranges the pieces to create an affective display. The film is visceral, poetic, dizzying and provocative, moving, sexy and repulsive by turns. It features brilliant performances from all of the cast, most notably Russell - few actresses can achieve the kind of freewheeling and real sensuality that she achieves so seemingly effortlessly here.Set mostly in Vienna, the film takes the psychologists need to control and coral the instincts and life force of a living human woman to be ultimately murderous. One is never quite sure whether Harvey Keitel's detective is a manifestation of guilt and the super-ego or a real on-the-trail policeman; in the end it doesn't matter, as the man in question is forced to face his own reality as a life-denying entity.The ending, as with Performance, shows a fragile human consciousness being driven off to their doom in a car which appears to be the manifestation of a post-modern world in which they are desperately lost.

Bad Timing is Nicholas Roeg's film about a relationship that is fueled by an obsessive passion, more or less, on both sides, and ends in a kind of mutual destruction. This has been fodder for many an independent film, but Roeg and his screenwriter attempt the material with a twist (Roeg, perhaps in his own distinct sensibility as an auteur, more-so). They're attempting to dissect it by a manner that goes along with how a mind works through a relationship after the fact, through memories of what worked, what didn't at all, what's foggy, what's crazy, subtle bits that connect more directly to others, and essentially reveals as much as any one person can think about the individuals in their link. Throw in a little detective/criminal mystery entanglement, some trademark Roeg editing and narrative technique, and sprinkle some of the most appropriately steamy (and appropriately disturbing) mature sexual context in a movie since Last Tango, and you've got a sort of cult classic.It's the kind of work that, as someone who loves getting a filmmaker who approaches things from a skewed perspective almost like an intellectual, is nearly inspiring. I didn't gain mind-blowing Bergmanesque insights into the realm of a torn relationship, but it's enough to squash competition that might show up late at night on IFC. It deals with a psychology professor, Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel, the most unlikely of male leads for a sexually charged and complex individual, but out-does his previous turn in Carnal Knowledge as a subtle performer of a man in total emotional crisis), and his romance with young Milena (the extraordinary Theresa Russel, arguably her best performance to date, soul pouring out like it's her one and only chance to shine), who is possibly already married to a much older man across the Vienna border (Denhalm Elliot, great in his few scenes).They have powerful lust and some good times, even in Morocco of all places, but... they just don't click, due to Alex not being able to let go of what Milena does, almost in a "every breath you take" style (watch as the Who's "Who Are You" is used in the most stirring effect imaginable). Without saying too much, something terrible happens to Milena, a hospital stay occurs, and an investigation (overnight, of course) happens between a detective (long-haired Harvey Keitel, compelling even when it's only in the smallest, two-note spurts) which leads to a test of pure existential upheaval. But Roeg firstly approaches the style like it's a shuffleboard of images and scenes, moods and thoughts, and it's a wonderful experiment in subjective approach. Many post-modern filmmakers only wish to try and make a film dealing with genre (i.e. crime/gangsters) like this, but Roeg does it sometimes subliminally, cut-aways implying sexual interaction and obsession that go the opposite way of the pondering style of a Last Tango (i.e. the operation scene, a cut-away between a tense gynecological exam during surgery and sex).The other thing that Roeg wisely does, as he did do sort of in Walkabout, is to let the actors play up to their strengths. While it was trickier to to as a director, and to actually notice in the finished product, in Walkabout, in Bad Timing there are countless scenes where we see the actors tapping into the characters full-throttle, and revealing little layers in the script that wouldn't be present in a more conventional treatment. It's simple to say this kind of material would get shut out at the door in Hollywood. Sure it would; it's a tale where lurid details (and truly disturbing ones, more-so for how they linger in the mind than how they're shown) seem to mask the more vulnerable shades of the story. But it's difficult to say that it might have more appeal than the one infamous quote "a sick movie made by sick people for sick people" seems to suggest.It is rough going at times, and not your grandmother's story of love gone awry. But it challenges perceptions and tries to pierce through certain concepts of what men expect from women and women expect from men: the lies, the hiding, being open, being free, being who we are in front of one another. At the end, what is the "bond" in a relationship? Do we know one another really? Roeg leaves it up to us to decide... in his sick way. And it's one of my favorites of 1980.

British drama from director Nicolas Roeg, an enigmatic filmmaker who prides himself on turning out jigsaw-puzzle movies intended for specialty audiences. Those who aren't especially impressed with Roeg's technique may say that his films are constructed in the editing process, not before or during the film's production, and that this leaves his pictures feeling empty or choppy (but always artistically choppy!). The plot of "Bad Timing" has something to do with flirtatious, troubled Theresa Russell and her relationship with an odd young psychiatrist. Ugly to look at, aloof and tiresome; the film did get some sterling notices in 1980, but most curious viewers will be satisfied after an hour. *1/2 from ****