According to Rank, the original distributer, Bad Timing is “a sick film made by sick people for sick people" and in the
intervening decades since its release this noir-ish thriller has been widely misunderstood,
unfairly chastised and sporadically available. Nicolas Roeg’s unflinching look
at the alienation of the sexes and sexual obsession may be unpalatable for some
(the self-appointed moral guardians or those that prefer staid comforts of a
linear narrative) but this gradual estrangement and unravelling of the
protagonists in an episodic series of flashbacks, which resonate into the
present towards a final brutal denouncement, is probably one of Roeg’s best
works and a damning treatise on sexual desire and the indignity of men.
More than
just a chronicling of the “lineaments of
gratified desire” Bad Timing deals
with obsession as a destructive impulse, a retrogressive transformation from
petty snipes, jealous looks, verbal condemnation, controlling tactics,
frustrated power dynamics, and abuse and violence, then finally a move towards
death. As Alex (Art Garfunkel) states to his lover Milena (Theresa Russell) when
she notices a so-called happy couple in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss painting (that was tellingly considered an image of
“perverted excess” when originally unveiled) the happiness only seems apparent
“because they don’t know each other well enough yet.” Consequently, for the
lovers outside the painting, in the movie frame, it is through the process of
getting to know each other and their desires and weaknesses and their own “perverted
excesses” that any possibility of happiness is unremittingly extinguished.
Set in Vienna in 1979, what Roeg
calls “an unstable city, a border city, only just handed back from the
Russians,” Bad Timing equally depicts
two unstable characters situated on the border between their crumbling
superegos and overwhelming Ids fighting in the interzone of their own
unfathomable libidos. Here Vienna, not by chance, is the home of Freud, the
birthplace of psychoanalysis and, it seems, the only appropriate place where
Alex and Milena can follow their own destructive impulses. However, this is not
a film strictly about obsession and volatile personalities approaching their
collective doom but the violence men inflict on women in their name of their
desire. The flashbacks of emotional violence in the relationship deliberately intercut
with the present day violence inflicted on Milena, post suicide attempt, for
example, serve to call attention to the progression of Alex’s unbridled
willingness to control and violate his lover.
Furthermore, what Roeg communicates through this fragmentary narrative
is the universal experience of the slow disintegration of love when lovers get
to know their desires and weaknesses and their capacity for violence towards
one another, to perverted excess, so to speak.
Conclusively, this larger revelation of the impossibility of desire, pushed to extremes, is suggested at the end of the film when the final shot of the Danube River, the border river, flowing endlessly towards a murky horizon seems to symbolize the movement that occurs in the film, that in life an infinite flow of lovers living on the border of their own urges and indignity will endlessly reach towards a murky horizon of their own damnation. Therefore, Bad Timing can never be just “a sick film for sick people” but a determined and relentless examination of the shared complexities and problems human desire.
Conclusively, this larger revelation of the impossibility of desire, pushed to extremes, is suggested at the end of the film when the final shot of the Danube River, the border river, flowing endlessly towards a murky horizon seems to symbolize the movement that occurs in the film, that in life an infinite flow of lovers living on the border of their own urges and indignity will endlessly reach towards a murky horizon of their own damnation. Therefore, Bad Timing can never be just “a sick film for sick people” but a determined and relentless examination of the shared complexities and problems human desire.
