Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

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.

La Truite (Joseph Losey, 1982)

Isabelle Huppert in La Truite

Frédérique: Isabelle Huppert
Rambert: Jean-Pierre Cassel
Lou Rambert: Jeanne Moreau
Saint-Genis: Daniel Olbrychski
Galuchat: Jacques Spiesser
Daigo Hamada: Isao Yamagata
Verjon: Jean-Paul Roussillon
The Count: Roland Bertin
Mariline: Lisette Malidor
Carter: Craig Stevens
Party Guest: Ruggero Raimondi
Gloria: Alexis Smith

Director: Joseph Losey
Screenplay: Monique Lange, Joseph Losey
Based on a novel by Roger Vailland
Cinematography: Henri Alekan
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Marie Castro
Music: Richard Hartley

I wish I had known beforehand that Joseph Losey's La Truite is supposedly a comedy or a "French sex farce" as the description on Rotten Tomatoes puts it. I wouldn't have worried so much that I had lost my sense of humor -- or concluded that Losey didn't know how to tell a joke. Or perhaps I would have laughed more at the scenes that seem to be meant to be funny, like Frédérique's bowling-alley hustle or the one in which she tosses out of the window the taxidermied fish belonging to the man who molested her in adolescence. Or even at the absurdity of seeing such luminaries of French cinema as Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau, and Jean-Pierre Cassel in a bowling alley. There was one scene that amused me: Alexis Smith's very funny cameo appearance as the worldly wise Gloria, whom Frédérique, encumbered with an armload of gift-wrapped packages, encounters in a Japanese hotel. But there's really not much humor to be found in stale marriages, suicide attempts, sexual harassment, and an apparent murder, anyway. Mostly La Truite is a slog, with Losey unable to set the proper prevailing tone -- or really any tone -- for his story about a young woman's rise to power and influence. We spend so much time puzzling out who these characters are and what their relationships to one another may be, that there's not much time left to appreciate the story, especially since it's chopped up with flashbacks. We know where we are in time mostly by the length of Frédérique's hair, which starts out in her childhood in the trout hatchery as a waist-length red mane, has become a pageboy bob by the time she meets the Ramberts and Saint-Genis, and is chopped off becomingly when the latter takes her with him to Japan. La Truite is visually interesting, thanks to the work of two veterans of French film: cinematographer Henri Alekan and production designer Alexandre Trauner. But Losey's work as both director and screenwriter lets them, and his cast, down.