Good Loving Gone Bad
Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing

2,951 words

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I think I love you. So what am I so afraid of?
The Partridge Family.

Love and cinema go together, but there is something strange about silver-screen romance. If a movie is described as “a love story”, most of us assume happy endings, albeit after difficulties getting there, as the course of true love never did run smooth. But this description gives no indication as to which kind of love we are talking about. There are many different types of love, and that is the point of the various amorous tales told at dinner in Plato’s Symposium. It’s not the content of the tales so much as the variety. Varieties of Amatory Experience, to paraphrase William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. But there remain two basic categories of love between people, good and bad, and to call a film a love story is like saying you wish someone luck without specifying whether the luck wished for is good or bad.

With that proviso, one of the greatest cinematic love stories ever made, in my humble opinion, is Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing. Released in 1980, and starring Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, Harvey Keitel and Denholm Elliott, its subject matter is not the love we assume when we hear the phrase, “it’s a love story”. The distribution company handling the film, The Rank Organization, disowned it even before release, calling it “a sick movie made by sick people for sick people”. This pithy summation never made it to the film’s poster, but the one that did tells you everything you need to know about Bad Timing; “A terrifying love story.”

The tale is straightforward enough, although the telling isn’t. A professor of psychology in Vienna (Alex Linden, played by Garfunkel) begins an affair with an American bohemian beauty, Milena Flaherty (played by Russell), but the relationship does not go well. Milena’s eventual suicide attempt is one timeline of the film, the affair the other, and the film cuts and jumps in a way that seems chaotic but is expertly crafted. It’s a very stylish film. I saw it when it opened, and I knew it was going to become a favorite as the opening scene combines two of my favorite artists, Gustav Klimt and Tom Waits. Garfunkel and Russell walk between pictures at a gallery exhibition (which includes Schiele, whose prints recur throughout the film) to the accompaniment of Waits’ Invitation to the Blues.

Bad Timing blends different stories which revolve around the dark star at the center of the movie: the potential psychological danger of passionate love affairs. The film flashes back and forth between Alex and Milena’s tempestuous tryst, the results of which put her in hospital, and the investigation of her suicide attempt by a brooding detective, Netusil, superbly played by Harvey Keitel. Despite the obvious centrality of Garfunkel and Russell to the action, and Russell’s coquettish brilliance, this is really Keitel’s movie.

Bad Timing is simultaneously visually demanding and harrowing. Conventionally attractive scenes shot in Vienna and Morocco are quite capable of jump-cutting to an operating theater during a messy tracheotomy. A scene on the Bratislavan border between Milena and her husband, played by the brilliant English actor Denholm Elliott, is set to Pachelbel’s beautiful and familiar Canon und Gigue before the editing slams you into a scene of an ambulance racing through the Viennese streets with sirens blaring, and containing Milena. Jumps between scenes can be purely symbolic, as when Keitel pours sand from an African souvenir while inspecting Milena’s apartment, and the timeline switches to Alex and Milena in Morocco. This is a movie for the cinematic semiotician, one to watch several times (I’ve lost count) and notice something new. Watch it in one bite, or take a prearranged break at half time. You don’t want to miss a scene – or a jump-cut – in a Nic Roeg movie.

Roeg has an impressive CV when it comes to making movies which are singular, intellectually demanding, and beautifully shot. His visual prowess was never in doubt after his spell as second unit cinematographer on David Lean’s classic Lawrence of Arabia. Lean was suitably impressed, and hired Roeg for his next movie. But Roeg’s later films paid as much attention to inner space as outer. Well, okay, Einstein was in his movie Insignificance (discussing physics with Marilyn Monroe, played by Russell, who was also Roeg’s wife) so I suppose that was about outer space. Then there’s Walkabout, starring English rose and member of The Railway Children, Jenny Agutter, which takes place entirely in the Australian bush. But Roeg strove to make visual what was happening in his characters’ heads, and cinematic reality gets arranged and rearranged to reflect this. Characters in Roeg movies often become distracted by insignificant objects, and this keeps viewer’s unease simmering. David Lynch has the same ability.

Roeg’s first movie was co-directed with Donald Cammell, an eccentric film-maker whose White of the Eye is an off-kilter serial-killer movie worth your time. Performance is a cult movie everyone should see it if they enjoy British cinema.  It also stars Mick Jagger, but we’ll get back to that. Three musical stars feature in Roeg films: Garfunkel, Jagger, and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. They are linked by Roeg and the link has nothing to do with music. But we’ll reprise that, so keep hold of that thought. It will be easier than keeping hold of what’s happening in Bad Timing on occasion.

Film writers used to talk about sub-plots, and Bad Timing is all sub-plots. The psychological battle between Linden and Keitel’s brooding policeman becomes central as the film enters its endgame, but another of the interweaving tensions of the movie is the ultimate failure of promiscuity. The year 1980 was the tail-end of consequence-free sex, the mini-epoch between The Pill and AIDS. This was still free-love time, with all its ruinous consequences. Linden is shown sleeping with his students while Marlene is obviously sluttish. In her case, and as so brilliantly expressed by Russell, there is enough of the coquette to keep Linden’s emotional response to her high while maintaining his psychological disequilibrium. Milena is very beautiful and looks good either in jet-setting, high-waist trousers, or drunk out of her mind in a torn and rain-soaked black cocktail dress. And she is phenomenally sexy, knowing what men like using facial expression alone.

The sex scenes – raunchy for the time – start off as lazy afternoon stuff, but become more dysfunctional as the film progresses. As Alex is driving and Milena talks of her dubious past, she accidentally spills schnapps between her legs and laughingly tells Alex he has to park up and do something about it. The sex becomes more violent as Linden’s tensions begin to stretch him on the rack, and his retrospective jealousy about Milena’s past partners betrays him again and again. He is sophisticated enough to be aloof to the loutish bohemians who make up Marlene’s entourage, but he can’t tame himself in her company. It’s just that his loutishness is psychological. It’s what he does for a job.

Writer Yale Udoff (who did nothing else of note) provides a script which has both to draw the viewer into the characters, and do it in accordance with the confusing and non-linear narrative. It’s hard to develop characters using flashbacks. The first meeting of Alex and Milena at a socialite party is a brilliant vignette. Linden is lounging suavely against a wall in evening dress, looking amused and inscrutable, and he and Milena have been exchanging the type of glances which are always precursors to something more. Those looks are the questions lovers ask before they are lovers, and are even a prequel to Dr. Linden lecturing his students in a seminar, quoting Freud’s description of a kiss as “an enquiry on the first floor as to whether the ground floor is open.” Milena makes the first move, with one of the greatest chat-up lines in cinema history:

“If we’re gonna meet, might as well be now.”

Any readers young enough and single enough – and quite possibly drunk enough – might want to try that one out when an opportunity presents itself, and if you do I hope you are lucky enough to get a reply as simultaneously suave and philosophical as Alex Linden’s:

“Then again, why spoil the mystery? There’s always the possibility it could have been perfect.”

When Linden has to leave the party, he finds his exit blocked by Milena’s shapely leg braced against the doorframe, which he has to bend down to walk underneath. Milena hands Linden a matchbox:

“Wrote my number on it.”

The matchbox reappears for a second at the end of the movie and, after all the couple (and the viewer) have been through in the meantime, it is a tiny source of terrible power, the enormity of events that are born from the seeds of a whimsical flirtation.

Bad Timing is a curious ensemble piece as the two best performances – discounting Elliott’s, which is relatively short – are from Keitel and Russell, and they never share a scene and never meet. Milena is on an operating table the whole time Netusil’s investigation is underway. Keitel has a trace of that Peter Falk technique made famous in Columbo, where every step in the investigation is made to look like a confused and perplexed detective has just stumbled on to something. Netusil has the facts in his head, an epiphany is imminent, but he pretends that details have just that second occurred to him. As Linden’s story about the time that elapsed from his arrival at the supine and overdosed Milena’s apartment, on the night of her suicide attempt, to him calling an ambulance begins to unravel, so too Garfunkel’s character begins to fold under questioning. The scenes between Keitel and Garfunkel are some of the best in the movie.

Garfunkel’s performance as a troubled, neurotic professional was assisted by some method acting he didn’t volunteer for in preparation for the role of Alex Linden. While shooting the movie, Garfunkel’s girlfriend Laurie Bird committed suicide in their New York apartment by overdosing on Valium. This is the same method by which the fictional Milena attempts to end her life in Bad Timing. Bird was an aspiring actress whose only role of note was, ironically enough, playing Paul Simon’s girlfriend in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. The context of Bird’s suicide makes for an extraordinary scene in Bad Timing in which a doctor asks Linden if he knew what pills Milena took, and Garfunkel fishes out an empty pill jar for the doctor to inspect. Art imitating life, just not in the way we are used to.

Garfunkel’s performance was never going to win any gongs, but I am not sure he’s acting all that much. It was a stroke of genius to put Garfunkel up against Russell and Keitel, two consummate actors at the height of their game, and from what I gather of Art Garfunkel, he is quite an egotistical man. He will have striven not to be drowned out by the thespian expertise he is performing with. All three of Roeg’s musician/actors come across in their respective movies as socially awkward, neurotic, and narcissistic, and that is why they fit the roles so perfectly. They’re musicians. They’re not doing all that much acting. As well as Garfunkel’s highly strung psychology professor, Jagger plays a washed-up rock star in bohemian London in Performance, and in another flash-of-genius Roeg movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie seems eerily at home playing an alien.

Meanwhile, back on the track of doomed love, the alternating timelines of Bad Timing are sometimes interwoven, as when Keitel stands at the doorway of Milena’s apartment looking in while she is in hospital. He sees an empty apartment, while we see another destructive scene between Alex and Milena. Keitel is made to seem a voyeur. He literally licks his lips looking at the bed on which we are seeing Milena and Alex engaging in a little more than social intercourse, although he sees just a rumpled, post-coital bed. Roeg has the visual ability to make space a little eerie, to use it as a character and make it intimidate his characters. Linden visits the Czech Embassy to ask how divorce works there, and his nerves are on display under the hostile gaze of two charmless officials whose faces are portraits of communist loyalty. Milena, it transpires, is still married to a Czech (Elliott), and the way Alex discovers this fact is the only thin part of the plot, depending on which way you look at it.

Aristotle was of the opinion, in the Poetics, that “a plausible impossibility is preferable to an implausible possibility”. I take this to mean that although the bar scene in Star Wars, in which all the bizarre alien conversations are sub-titled into English from their different intergalactic languages, is completely believable, Robert de Niro happening to bump into Meryl Streep at the end of Falling in Love, and happening to do so in a very crowded New York subway, stretches the limits of credulity. The same slightly over-strung coincidence takes Dr. Linden into military intelligence headquarters to profile various individuals from their files. Looking at Elliott’s character, Stefan Vodnik, Linden sees a photo of Vodnik’s wife, and it’s Milena. Maybe movie directors should be allowed one outrageous coincidence per movie that just so happens to fit the plot, and this is most definitely it.

This finding, of course, pushes Linden into a fit of jealousy, and although he is to blame for many of the scenes which go from good to bad, Milena is one of those “free spirits” we hear so much about, the ones who don’t really pay attention to the consequences of their free-spiritedness, and its possible effects on other people, including the people who love them. Especially them. Milena is one of those women. There are red flags waving all around her from the moment Linden sees her, but he is still drawn in, seeing the psychology of the affair to his advantage before it turns against him. He’s like Narcissus looking into the pool at himself just before someone pushes him in. But Milena is so obviously both a game-player and a sexual adventuress, and that can be as irresistible to a man as the finest of faces.

There are problem women throughout art and Milena is a problem woman. She’s not Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, tormented by demons of boredom, or Škvorecký’s Lenka Silver in Miss Silver’s Past, the man-taunting keeper of a dark secret (that book would make a great movie). She isn’t Glenn Close’s psycho bitch in Fatal Attraction or Linda Fiorentino’s deadly and emotionless con-artist in The Last Seduction. And she isn’t genuinely, clinically nuts like Ophelia or Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue. She is more akin to Christina Light (later to become the Princess Casamassima) in Henry James’ Roderick Hudson: troubled and correspondingly troublesome, just with added booze. The inclusion of Klimt’s Salomé with the Head of John the Baptist in the opening gallery shots in Vienna casts a spell over the whole film. Klimt (a Viennese artist) used as his model for Salomé, as he often did, his mistress, Adele Bloch-Bauer. As the dancing sorceress holds the Baptist’s head on a plate in the painting, she has what can only be described as a look of intense sexual gratification. There’s something of Klimt’s Salomé in Milena.

As with all troubled love affairs, home truths are fired across the barricades and they hit home. What is it about arguing lovers that acts like a truth drug? Linden’s retrospective jealousy when he sees a photo of Milena by a lake, cavorting with a young man, forces him into another of his psychological temper tantrums, and when Milena tells him that the boy was her brother (who we assume is dead because of the past tense), Linden refuses to apologize (the single hardest task lovers set one another). The brief exchange is crushingly sad; the whole movie in microcosm:

“You’ll never change, Milena.”

“If you weren’t who you are I wouldn’t have to.”

The phrase “bad timing” generally refers to an unwelcome coincidence, but as the movie of that name reaches its dénouement, it takes on another meaning as Keitel and Linden play a game of mental checkers, each trying to outwit the other over the exact timeframe of the key set of events that give the film its sinister edge. By the climax of the movie, Linden’s liberty and Milena’s life hang in the balance. Both keep life and liberty, as Keitel suffers some bad timing of his own. There is still time for one last shift in the timeframe, this time to the future. I won’t spoil it.

Bad Timing is a cinematic masterwork of psychological drama, and it’s still not easy to watch, particularly if you yourself have ever had a psychologically violent relationship. This is emphatically not a movie for a quiet night in with your partner and a bottle of wine because a RomCom it ain’t. But if you like your movies to be liberally sprinkled with eroticism and its dark obverse, and you like your cinematic psychology intense, then I recommend Bad Timing with the usual disclaimer to approach with caution. Apart from the distributors’ damning indictment of their own movie, and some disgusted critical reviews, it wasn’t even released on home video, coming out domestically only in 2005 on DVD. So, an added attraction might be that, if you do watch the movie, a lot of people didn’t want you to.