A Sick Film Made By Sick People For Sick People

This post's title references an (in)famous remark made by one of the executives of the production company responsible for financing Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing. And Harvey Keitel don't even get nekkid in this one!

This film had a rather astounding impact on me.

One review I read claims that "Bad Timing tells an extremely simplistic story". Sure, if it were a movie about a psychoanalyst who met a pretty young thing & had an affair with her, & then the pretty young thing ended up in the ER, I would consider the story simplistic. But...that's not the story. That's more or less the "Once upon a time" part of the story. The subtitle of the film at the time of its release was "A Sensual Obsession". That's the story. That's the plot. That's what happens. The film focuses less on standard plot machinations & chooses to make its story the repercussions of obsession.

And the film explores at extraordinary length an inherent factor in any romantic relationship - the desire to make somebody be who you really (secretly) want them to be. As Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) theorizes when he & Milena (Theresa Russell) view Klimt's "The Kiss", the reason for the lovers' apparent passion & joy is because "they don't know each other that well yet" - meaning Klimt's subjects haven't discovered what would make the other perfect, hence they can still maintain the illusion of perfect happiness with each other. The original title of the film was, in fact, Illusions. Indeed, one of the film's first lines sums everything up - encountering each other at a party for the first time, Alex & Milena speak briefly. Alex says, "Why spoil the mystery? If we don't meet, there's always the possibility it could have been perfect," before confessing that he's not sure what that means.

Roeg acknowledges that nobody is immune from that sickness peculiar to relationships. Everybody wants to change something about their lover, & it's the question of whether you can ultimately accept that you can't accomplish this that often determines the longevity, & conclusion, of your relationship. The film offers a series of mirrors in a range of reflectiveness - Alex & Det. Netusil (Harvey Keitel, whose performance may or may not have been good; I spent every moment of his screen time trying to discern whether he was playing an Austrian or an American detective); Alex & Stephen (Denholm Elliott), Milena's Czech husband. The starkest mirror, the most absolute in terms of respecting the natural contrariness of the "mirror image", is betwixt Alex & Milena. When he laments that Milena will never change, she points out that "If you weren't who you are, I wouldn't have to". It's one of the most telling lines in the film, for it emphasizes that insofar as Alex wishes to tame the spirited Milena, Milena herself wishes that Alex would change. So the wild free-spirit is not immune to the sickness of wanting to mold somebody.

Subtlety is not a characteristic of Nicolas Roeg's. Although he never quite crosses over into Ken Russell territory, the filmic techniques that no doubt were fresh & new in the 1970s often seem a bit dated now. I think particularly of the cross-cutting employed in Walkabout to contrast the barbarianism of the modern world with the civility of the natural (Aboriginal) world. It's a bit obvious & overly dramatic. However, Roeg employed the same sort of labyrinthine structure in many of his films - the cross-cutting, the non-linearity. Bad Timing in a way reminds me of Atom Egoyan's magnificent The Sweet Hereafter, in that each film maker achieves the zenith of the labyrinthine structure (I would argue that Egoyan's style is a bit more akin to those Russian dolls (where each one reveals another) than Roeg's maze-like editing) in which they excel. To be somewhat more succinct, Bad Timing & The Sweet Hereafter are the pinnacle of each maker's distinctive style, in which technique & subject matter coalesce & commingle to masterful effect.

As for the actors, Theresa Russell is simply wonderful. It's difficult to believe she was twenty two when this was made. She has a unique quality, a definite beauty, but not in the cookie-cutter mode of, say, Jessica Alba. In fact, trying to imagine any contemporary young actress achieving what Russell did is well-nigh impossible. The few reviews that one can find online tend to carp on Garfunkel's wooden acting style, as though it were a fault of the film. I, on the other hand, thought it was, if not fully intentional, still rather effective. Because it helps obfuscate what otherwise might be as painfully obvious as those scenes in Walkabout - it keeps the viewer from guessing right away the lengths to which Alex's character is capable of going. What his "angle" is. How, exactly, Milena got to where she is at the film's beginning & what, if any, role Alex played in it. When the characters say they love each other, it's impossible to believe, because by that point all you see is their obsession with each other, & with each other's flaws. Is that a fault of the acting? If so, then it's an excellent fault.

The Criterion DVD release of Bad Timing marked the film's very first time on video. Twenty four years after it first came out. I expect the critical backlash was quite strong at the time of its release (frankly, I literally have a very hard time believing this film was ever made at all, which is a sad commentary on the current state of cinema), & I can't imagine a lot of people went to see it in the theater, but apparently the main point of contention barring a video release was the film's soundtrack. I'm not surprised - the soundtrack features Tom Waits, Keith Jarrett (the Koln Concert, no less), Billie Holiday & the Who, amongst others. (Roeg actually tells a funny story in the DVD extras about how Jarrett's music came to be used in the film.) Luckily, the good folks at Criterion managed to rescue this film from oblivion.


I say luckily, & I mean it. It makes me indescribably happy that this film exists. But at the same time, I found the experience of watching it unsettling in the extreme. Extraordinarily disturbing. In fact, I found it more disturbing than David Cronenberg's Videodrome, which heretofore was kind of my epitome of disturbing cinema. After the film, I had to go to my video store. The experience was no less unsettling than the film. I literally couldn't make eye contact with people. I wanted to be nowhere near them & I was terrified that one would try to talk to me. The overheard & kindly put suggestion of a boyfriend to his girlfriend that she take some ibuprofen was met with disdain by the woman, who coldly said "I'm going to deal with it on my own. Why are you being such an asshole?" On the surface afforded to me, of course, it seemed that the woman was the asshole. But who's to say? Did they even understand the mechanisms of their relationship?

The ultimate mirror of the film is the film itself, for it is the mirror which Roeg wields at the audience. Said Roeg later of the film:

"I made a film called Bad Timing that I thought everybody would respond to. It was about obsessive love and physical obsession. I thought this must touch everyone, from university dons down. But it had a curious effect on people..."