Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)
Cast: Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, Harvey Keitel, Denholm Elliott, Daniel Massey, Dana Gillespie, William Hootkins, Eugene Lipinski, George Roubicek, Stefan Gryff. Screenplay: Yale Udoff. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Art direction: David Brockhurst. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Richard Hartley.
The jigsaw-puzzle narrative of Bad Timing makes for a film whose parts are more interesting than its whole. It never settles down to be what it is by nature, a psychosexual thriller, but loses itself in a lot of loose ends and red herrings. Which is not to say that it isn't a more interesting film than a lot from its era: I'd rather watch it again than, say, the year's Oscar best picture, Robert Redford's Ordinary People. The people in Bad Timing are anything but ordinary. Art Garfunkel, hardly a conventional leading man, plays Alex Linden, a "research psychoanalyst" who gets involved with a seductive young woman, Milena Flaherty, played with her usual sensuality by Theresa Russell. Linden finds out that Milena is married to, but separated from, an older man who lives in Czechoslovakia, Stefan Vognic (Denholm Elliott) -- whom Linden, whose sideline involves consulting work for American forces stationed in Vienna, is asked to investigate. You can sense at this point that the plot is going to wander off into eddies of intrigue that we can never quite bring into focus. But the precipitating event, as far as any central plot is concerned, is Milena's attempt at suicide, which brings an Austrian police detective named Netusil (the oddly cast but also oddly effective Harvey Keitel) into the picture. When Linden, who reported the suicide attempt, goes taciturn and evasive under Netusil's attempts to interview him, the detective grows more determined to find out about the relationship between Linden and Milena, which as far as the film is concerned only spurs more and more flashbacks. The evident determination of director Nicolas Roeg and screenwriter Yale Udoff to avoid anything like conventional thriller clichés while at the same time using them as a kind of cinematic subtext produces a film that's been either damned as a maddening muddle or praised as a provocative exploration of sexual obsession. To my mind it's a fascinating botch at best.
