Bad Timing

It is extraordinary to think that Nic Roeg’s 1980 film, Bad Timing, was suppressed for over twenty years by its distributor. By the time he made this film Roeg had a string of strong and iconoclastic films under his belt: Performance (1968, but only released in 1970), Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Considered a visionary firebrand, Roeg did not shy away from what were then considered ‘controversial’ topics, such as the cross-dressing, gender dismorphia and sadistic violence in Performance that led to its release being delayed by two years. After the sensual and decadent Mick Jagger in Performance and the androgynous David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing was Roeg’s third film with the main character played by a pop/rock star and not a professional actor – on this occasion the handsomely intense Art Garfunkel, playing psychology professor Alex Linden. Set in a Vienna still steeped in Cold War atmosphere (that oppressive sense of massed force on the horizon), the film depicts, through flash-backs and -forwards, Linden’s increasingly obsessive infatuation with a free-spirited and already-married depressive, Milena Flaherty (brilliantly played by Theresa Russell – and Denham Elliott is excellent as her wistful and wise husband). The film starts with Flaherty’s possible end, sprawled on a hospital trolley after an overdose. The Austrian police inspector Netusil, excellently played by Harvey Keitel (and an antidote to his other 1970 film, Saturn 3) is at first bemused and then intrigued by Alex Linden’s evasiveness and argumentativeness when questioned about his relationship with Milena. Thus ripened for suspicion, his suspicions are duly aroused by the bad timing of a radio programme in Linden’s account of his evening. Gradually, we, and Netusil, get nearer to Linden’s awful truth… Garfunkel and Russell turned in the most intense of performances. Describing it as ‘a sick film made by sick people for sick people’  the distributor, Rank, briefly released it and then locked it away. (The story is well told in this article. Was the film and its subject matter really so much more shocking than, say, Liliana Cavani’s 1974 Night Porter?)  How terribly, terribly frustrating for the cast – particularly Garfunkel and Russell – and the director to create something close to a masterpiece and then have it lost in that way!  As Roeg said in an interview, it’s not the same for people to talk about the film now…