Bad Timing

Nicolas Roeg's first film with Theresa Russell, who became his muse and wife for a time, was Bad Timing, released in 1980. Roeg explains the title in an interview on the extras of the DVD--essentially, all success is good timing, and the rest of our lives is bad timing.

There is bad timing for the pair that are featured here. Russell is a young American woman who is married to a much older man in Czechoslovakia (which at that time was still behind the Iron Curtain). He lets her travel to Austria, where she meets Dr. Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel), a teacher of psychology at a university. She goes after him, and they become lovers.

The film is framed by her being rushed to the hospital for a suicide attempt. As a police detective (Harvey Keitel) questions Garfunkel, we see flashbacks to the relationship.

While Bad Timing is an okay movie, there's something deeply disturbing about it. It all leads up to an act of monstrosity by Garfunkel, which I won't reveal here, but there are clues to his strangeness all throughout. He tells Keitel that he doesn't use the word "mad," as in crazy, and he is spent his entire career trying to figure out what is normal.

Russell basically wants an open relationship, but he is jealous of every man she talks to. She also hits the sauce quite a bit, but in the final analysis, she just wants a carefree life of freedom, while Garfunkel wants to control her. He's even asked by the American military to assess her psychological profile (it is unclear why--her husband, Denholm Elliot, may be a spy but I wasn't sure).

As usual with Roeg, the film is cut jaggedly, with bits and pieces strewn like wreckage along a highway. This works very well when Keitel looks at Russell's room after her suicide attempt, and it is cut with Garfunkel's entry to the room after she has called him to say goodbye.

Roeg liked working with rock stars--he did with Mick Jagger and David Bowie, and Garfunkel, while not a gifted thespian, gives the character a stony nonchalance. Keitel, playing an Austrian without attempting an accent, is very good as a man probing for the truth. He knows what Garfunkel did to her, even though he'll never be able to prove it, but he wants Garfunkel's confession.

Bad Timing is not among Roeg's best films, but is an interesting piece of work.