BAD TIMING

by Kevin Koehler

Disregard anything you may have heard to the contrary: Nicolas Roeg is not a good director. Beyond his pardonable crimes of dated camera techniques (the man never met a zoom he did not like) and casting rock stars as leads, Roeg fell in love with an editing style known to most as the "cut-up technique" but which I like to call superfluous narrative obfuscation (of if you like acronyms, SNOb). Made popular by Beat author William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch being a notable example, a terrible book by any measure that pretentious twits/drug addicts will defend to the death), SNOb involved (I am simplifying) taking portions of a film/book/poem and assembling it at random with little regard for conventional narrative structure.

At best (trust me, we are setting the bar quite low), SNOb reveals some hidden truth through the juxtaposition of atypical scenes or phrases (or as Burroughs said, "When you cut word lines the future leaks out"). At worst we get incomprehensible crap. Bad Timing falls somewhere in between – not completely unwatchable but certainly no revelation, either.

Dr. Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) is an American psychoanalyst residing in Cold War Vienna (the Mecca for head shrinkers). His girlfriend Milena (Theresa Russell) has just tried to kill herself; as emergency medical procedures are performed on her comatose body, we revisit their passionate relationship in flashback in an effort to find out what exactly went wrong. Much sex is had.

Non-linear storytelling is not something I am against. However, I do appreciate it when it has a point - when a disjointed narrative structure lends meaning to the themes and the story (see The Sweet Hereafter). With Bad Timing, Roeg has taken what is a relatively mundane plot, a few uninspiring characters (though Theresa Russell does the most with what she is given), added some bizarrely sordid plot developments, placed this whole unappetizing concoction in a food processor and let rip.

Unfortunately for Nicolas Roeg, the future does not leak out. Never-ending cuts between Milena on a hospital gurney undergoing an invasive procedure and some fractured moment from her relationship with Linden are alternatingly tedious and redundant (editing together sex and a tracheotomy is rather inspired, but for all the wrong reasons). Perhaps Roeg realized his material was simply unexceptional to begin with and that a few cycles through his magical mystery editing machine could only improve it (indeed, the original draft of the screenplays contain no narrative funny business). He probably wasn’t wrong, though I wonder whether the cure killed this patient, not the disease. What is poetic metaphor to Roeg is often silly or plain pretentious - I found myself embarrassed for Ms. Russell, having as she does to lie nude with Art Garfunkel and pretend he's sexy. That is, until I remembered she actually married her director a short time after Bad Timing was released, at which time she forfeited any claims to sympathy. I'd be remiss if it weren't mentioned that Russell is still quite fond of the film two decades later - a slight bit of revisionism on her part given she tried to quit the production four days in, but all the same.

And then there's Art Garfunkel. Poor Art Garfunkel, in way over his afro'd head, a slave to Roeg's strange obsession with casting musicians as the leads in his pictures (The Man Who Feel To Earth, Performance). Not only is he asked to be a romantic lead here, but a dangerous romantic lead at that. It's a strange choice to say the least (perhaps Roeg left his casting to arbitrary chance as well), and Garfunkel's underwhelming presence at the center of the film is perhaps its ultimate undoing. Harvey Keitel, co-starring as an Austrian police detective, is wasted in what is essentially a non-role.

One imagines a world in which Bad Timing starred Keitel instead of Art Garfunkel, though that picture, undoubtedly improved, would be indecipherable as well.

Interesting footnote: Bad Timing received an X rating upon its release and was disowned by the famed film production house Rank Organisation (who refused to allow their "banging gong" logo to show before the picture). An executive at Rank called it "a sick film made by sick people for sick people."

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.