A sick film made by sick people for sick people
A review requested by Freya, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
Bad Timing, the project with which director Nicolas Roeg navigated from the cinema of the 1970s (where his artistic sensibilities fit very well) to the 1980s (where they did not), is a film that evokes to me nothing so much as the sensation of running around with your hand firmly clamped to your mouth as it fills with hot saliva, trying like mad to find any kind of receptacle to vomit in before your limited control over your throat muscles gives way to your stomach saying "nope, we are having absolutely none of that". I mean this as the most enthusiastic kind of compliment. For Bad Timing is also a movie whose primary function is to tether the viewer helplessly to the subjectivity of two characters caught in a mental hurricane as they navigate a romantic relationship that is rotten from its very foundations, both of them experiencing a torrent of memories that reveal in no particular order the chaotic, malformed emotions that have gotten them to the incredibly ugly place where the narrative starts, which is also the last day of the story proper.
I'm using the word "ugly" in a figurative sense, but also a pretty much literal sense. After the opening credits sequence - which I'll return to, because it's a pretty striking assault on the viewer all by itself - the first thing that we see is a simply foul shot of an ambulance, shot on an anarmophic lens that make the lens flares coming off of the ambulance's headlights streak out horizontally across the image and creating just the nastiest distorted smudge of ugly lighting that effaces the rest of the image. It's a slap in the face, one preceded by the atonal wailing of the ambulance's siren fading in over the soundtrack, which has up to this point been dominated by Tom Waits's "An Invitation to the Blues". That's not even one of Wait's more raspy, guttural recordings, but he's still singing like he's reaching down his throat with both hands to pull the words out of his vocal cords, scratching the words out more than singing them, and I rather suspect that Roeg picked the song more for its sonic qualities than its musical qualities as such; there's something thrillingly abrasive about just diving right into Waits, especially given what it does in concert with the imagery in the opening credit sequence (I guess I'm returning to it pretty much right away). What we're seeing is an art gallery displaying several Gustav Klimt paintings, all of their gold monochrome and assertive shape-driven flatness skewed and warped by the acute angles Roeg and cinematographer Anthony Richmond are using to frame them. The tranquility of the setting is transformed into something scraping and unpleasant by this harsh jangle of sound and image, so that when we see a human figure that we can reliably identify and recognize when Art Garfunkel walks through the frame to look at a painting, we associate him with that nasty, hostile aesthetic texture. And this will prove to be the exact right association to make, given that approximately 100% of all subsequent appearance of Garfunkel in the movie - he plays the main character, an American psychiatrist practicing and guest-lecturing in Vienna, the world's most symbolically fraught city in which to be a psychiatrist - will also invite us to find him to be a nasty, hostile aesthetic presence.
But anyway, we're having sandpaper rubbed all over our faces before the siren starts to overtake waits, and that hideous shot of the ambulance swings in, and we get an opportunity to start assembling the fragments of artistic stimuli into a narrative situation: a young woman named Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell) is being rushed to the hospital, non-responsive and apparently quite close to death, and truth be told I don't recall if we're ever told it was a suicide attempt, or if that's just what best fits the available evidence, including how the first thing we hear of speech in the movie is her breathing "Stefan I'm sorry", though it's not clear if that's diegetic, or in her head, or part of a different moment altogether. Garfunkel is here, too - he's not Stefan, he's Alex, but we don't know that yet - and the first shot we see of him in the ambulance finds him leaning in a most unattractive pose, one that artificially squashes his head down onto his neck and spread his face out like a blob fish, and to add insult to injury, Richmond isn't giving him an eye light or even, apparently, a bounce to fill his face, so he looks hollow-eyed, skeletal and flesh all at once. Basically, just assume that I could describe maybe literally every shot of Garfunkel in the movie in ways that make him seem unappealing, or threatening, or gross, or just like a completely miserable S.O.B., and the only reason I'm not going to is because I want this review to be less than 10,000 words long. But Roeg and Richmond and Garfunkel, they're up to something magnificent in making sure we find Alex impossible to connect to, impossible to even imagine that we're supposed to like him.
So it's areal knock-you-on-your-ass opening 130 seconds, anyway, and it's not even fully clear yet how aggressive Bad Timing plans to be. We can kind of understand, based on the complete lack of connective tissue between the Klimt exhibit and the ambulance, that this isn't going to be playing nice with narrative cause-and-effect between scenes, or even between shots, but one doesn't necessarily assume that's going to happen based solely on an opening credits sequence, since those are often pretty abstract. As it happens, a very long stretch of Bad Timing is, in fact, going to be just that abstract, and it starts pretty much instantaneously: we've barely had a chance to situate ourselves in the ambulance with Milena and Alex before the film cuts to a scene on an extremely overcast day, at the automobile bridge at the border crossing between Austria and Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, where we see a melancholy-looking Denholm Elliott - he's Stefan, but we don't that yet either - presenting his papers to the guards, while weepy string music sweeps over the soundtrack, and in so doing gives our first emotional cue where both the sound and image feel like they're doing the same thing, which is such a relief that it's not even as upsetting as it might be that there is no indication of what's going on or where we are. And this is going to be the mode the film resides in for a long time: scene transitions marked with extremely abrupt ruptures in sound and image, but which give us no anchor on either side of the transition to understand how the scenes fit together, or how the new scene fits with any other scene to have preceded it. In and of itself, this is not necessarily anything particularly special: Roeg's own filmography is packed with movies that are assembling their story through scenes assembled through an initially unclear subjective chronology, like 1973's Don't Look Now or 1976's The Man Who Fell to Earth. But Bad Timing takes it to an extreme that makes even the brilliantly confusing and withholding The Man Who Fell to Earth seem straightforward.
It's easy enough to get at the why of this: we're reliving the details of Milena and Alex's relationship, not in the order that they occurred, but as they filter through the stressed-out minds of the two principals while Milena receives emergency surgery and Alex leaves. Though even that's making it too pat: some of the flashbacks are unmistakably cued to Alex, but none are unmistakably cued to Milena, who is after all in a medical coma while the bulk of the movie is happening, and at a certain point it feels like Bad Timing itself is having the flashbacks itself. But it's all close enough to the same thing: the flashbacks aren't exactly expositing the life story of a bad romance, so much as telling us about the mental state of the two participants right now, why they're having these thoughts in this order at this moment in time, and here's the thing: both Alex and Milena are very mentally unstable people, and indeed this is basically the "story" of Bad Timing, how two people who are probably best off being in no relationships are feeding each other in the most brutal, toxic ways, so that Alex's paranoid, violent possessiveness sends Milena into behaving ever more erratically and messily, perhaps as an attempt to wrest herself away from his control, perhaps as a way of punishing him, and he responds to this by being even more of a controlling, bullying thug. The relationship is, in other words, a long spiral into worse and worse emotional torture, with Milena acting like a bird angrily thrashing about with a broken wing, and Alex as the snake writhing towards her, waiting for the optimal moment to devour her whole.
And these are the minds we're inhabiting through the fragmentary narrative structure, following the development of their relationship as they (or at least Alex) reflects on it. So it's not really surprising that the structure itself feels chaotic and mentally diseased, both in its overall sloppiness - Milena has a flashback inside Alex's flashback at one point, which isn't close to the most aggressive collapse of coherent subjectivity in the film, it's just one that I was very confidently able to parse - and in the sometimes horrible collision of moments produced by cross-cutting between elements, most unpleasantly when (presumably) Alex recalls the first time he had sex with Milena while she's having her throat cut open for an emergency tracheotomy that the filmmakers are film in rather dauntingly unforgiving close-up. My understanding is that the film was written and shot in chronological order, but with the plan that Roeg and editor Tony Lawson would turn it into this hellish kaleidoscope in post, and it's impressive to me that Roeg, a celebrated cinematographer before his turn to directing, would be this adept at crafting a film which relies so much on editing to create virtually all of its effects; the hard lighting and lack of beauty in the film certainly is important, so it's not like the film isn't working in terms of "images" but it is primarily a film about how different, unrelated moments are pressed together in the cut to create psychological horror in the collision of moments.
It's an extraordinarily potent, nerve-wracking experience, 123 minutes spent exploring a bitterly ugly side of human relationships without seeing anything particularly redeeming about the toxic relationship it presents. In Russell's extraordinary performance, Milena at least comes across as pitiable and not fully in control of her impulses, with the actor working in very electrifying, messy mode that involves lots of slurring words and casually flopping her body into poses that offer no graceful way of filming them, and it's the best kind of "looks unrehearsed and roughly improvised but has clearly been worked out in excruciating detail" screen naturalism. So she, at least, feels like a human that we can understand and weep for. Garfunkel's performance comes from an entirely different movie: he's mannered, he's stiff, he feels very conspicuously placed in relation to lights to make his eyes seem oppressive. Given that Garfunkel was not, after all, an actor by trade, it's at least a bit tempting to suppose that Roeg cast him deliberately for his awkward, uncharismatic screen presence and relied on his non-acting, but I think that's being unfair to Garfunkel: there's something very dark in Alex that seems to gurgle its way out of Garfunkel's skinny frame, looming in ways that his physical appearance alone can't account for. One compares this to, for example, his former bandmate Paul Simon's affable shithead in Annie Hall, a film to which these feels like a surprisingly on-point companion piece (fragmentary, flashback-driven portrayal of a fundamentally toxic romantic relationship about over-intellectual types who are smart enough to psychoanalyze themselves but not smart enough not to), and this is much richer: that's the difference between being a small character in a melancholy comedy versus being the antihero of a psychological thriller, in part, but also there's a predatory need in Alex that's awfully powerful to watch. Put together, the two stars of Bad Timing complement each other wonderfully, falling into a very delicate balance where they, as actors have tremendous chemistry together and make it clear why the characters would be attracted to each other, while never, not once in two hours, giving us a reason to root for the onscreen couple to succeed, or to stay apart for longer than one scene.
So it's all pretty bleak and bitter, and one understands completely why the outraged executives of the Rank Organisation, which paid for this, were so disgusted with the thought of releasing it into the world; it was described by one of those executives as "a sick film made by sick people for sick people", and I sure don't see a real counter-argument. It's one thing for the narrative content to be this harsh; the formal expression of that content makes it so much more distressing. And I will say that the film generally grows more straightforwardly comprehensible as it goes along, motivated in part by its narrative form: I haven't mentioned Inspector Netusil, played by Harvey Keitel, because he's very much the film's framework more than its subject, even though he's the third-biggest role, but basically the way that Bad Timing works is that the more Netusil figures out about what put Milena in the hospital, and realizes that this has a lot more to with Alex's actions than Alex is letting on, the more that the cross-cutting flashbacks start to lock into a very clear, linear progression. Which is probably necessary, and also a bit disappointing. Also, the film trades one form of being distressing ("Alex is awful and I hate spending time in his brain") for a different kind of being distressing ("Alex is pure evil and watching his behavior horrifies and disgusts me"), and as result becomes less artful and more just plain cruel. But then, "humans are cruel animals" is basically the film's thesis statement, so that's probably necessary as well. At any rate, the end result of all this is one of the most dazzlingly stylized films I have seen from the whole of the 1980s, and a film that is two hours of nonstop bad vibes, so it kind of feels sickening to be dazzled by it, and watching it feels like the movie hates you for being the kind of person who watches this kind of movie. Maybe not the first thing that screams "that's cinema, baby!" but I don't know, I certainly couldn't tear myself away from the screen.
Bad Timing, the project with which director Nicolas Roeg navigated from the cinema of the 1970s (where his artistic sensibilities fit very well) to the 1980s (where they did not), is a film that evokes to me nothing so much as the sensation of running around with your hand firmly clamped to your mouth as it fills with hot saliva, trying like mad to find any kind of receptacle to vomit in before your limited control over your throat muscles gives way to your stomach saying "nope, we are having absolutely none of that". I mean this as the most enthusiastic kind of compliment. For Bad Timing is also a movie whose primary function is to tether the viewer helplessly to the subjectivity of two characters caught in a mental hurricane as they navigate a romantic relationship that is rotten from its very foundations, both of them experiencing a torrent of memories that reveal in no particular order the chaotic, malformed emotions that have gotten them to the incredibly ugly place where the narrative starts, which is also the last day of the story proper.
I'm using the word "ugly" in a figurative sense, but also a pretty much literal sense. After the opening credits sequence - which I'll return to, because it's a pretty striking assault on the viewer all by itself - the first thing that we see is a simply foul shot of an ambulance, shot on an anarmophic lens that make the lens flares coming off of the ambulance's headlights streak out horizontally across the image and creating just the nastiest distorted smudge of ugly lighting that effaces the rest of the image. It's a slap in the face, one preceded by the atonal wailing of the ambulance's siren fading in over the soundtrack, which has up to this point been dominated by Tom Waits's "An Invitation to the Blues". That's not even one of Wait's more raspy, guttural recordings, but he's still singing like he's reaching down his throat with both hands to pull the words out of his vocal cords, scratching the words out more than singing them, and I rather suspect that Roeg picked the song more for its sonic qualities than its musical qualities as such; there's something thrillingly abrasive about just diving right into Waits, especially given what it does in concert with the imagery in the opening credit sequence (I guess I'm returning to it pretty much right away). What we're seeing is an art gallery displaying several Gustav Klimt paintings, all of their gold monochrome and assertive shape-driven flatness skewed and warped by the acute angles Roeg and cinematographer Anthony Richmond are using to frame them. The tranquility of the setting is transformed into something scraping and unpleasant by this harsh jangle of sound and image, so that when we see a human figure that we can reliably identify and recognize when Art Garfunkel walks through the frame to look at a painting, we associate him with that nasty, hostile aesthetic texture. And this will prove to be the exact right association to make, given that approximately 100% of all subsequent appearance of Garfunkel in the movie - he plays the main character, an American psychiatrist practicing and guest-lecturing in Vienna, the world's most symbolically fraught city in which to be a psychiatrist - will also invite us to find him to be a nasty, hostile aesthetic presence.
But anyway, we're having sandpaper rubbed all over our faces before the siren starts to overtake waits, and that hideous shot of the ambulance swings in, and we get an opportunity to start assembling the fragments of artistic stimuli into a narrative situation: a young woman named Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell) is being rushed to the hospital, non-responsive and apparently quite close to death, and truth be told I don't recall if we're ever told it was a suicide attempt, or if that's just what best fits the available evidence, including how the first thing we hear of speech in the movie is her breathing "Stefan I'm sorry", though it's not clear if that's diegetic, or in her head, or part of a different moment altogether. Garfunkel is here, too - he's not Stefan, he's Alex, but we don't know that yet - and the first shot we see of him in the ambulance finds him leaning in a most unattractive pose, one that artificially squashes his head down onto his neck and spread his face out like a blob fish, and to add insult to injury, Richmond isn't giving him an eye light or even, apparently, a bounce to fill his face, so he looks hollow-eyed, skeletal and flesh all at once. Basically, just assume that I could describe maybe literally every shot of Garfunkel in the movie in ways that make him seem unappealing, or threatening, or gross, or just like a completely miserable S.O.B., and the only reason I'm not going to is because I want this review to be less than 10,000 words long. But Roeg and Richmond and Garfunkel, they're up to something magnificent in making sure we find Alex impossible to connect to, impossible to even imagine that we're supposed to like him.
So it's areal knock-you-on-your-ass opening 130 seconds, anyway, and it's not even fully clear yet how aggressive Bad Timing plans to be. We can kind of understand, based on the complete lack of connective tissue between the Klimt exhibit and the ambulance, that this isn't going to be playing nice with narrative cause-and-effect between scenes, or even between shots, but one doesn't necessarily assume that's going to happen based solely on an opening credits sequence, since those are often pretty abstract. As it happens, a very long stretch of Bad Timing is, in fact, going to be just that abstract, and it starts pretty much instantaneously: we've barely had a chance to situate ourselves in the ambulance with Milena and Alex before the film cuts to a scene on an extremely overcast day, at the automobile bridge at the border crossing between Austria and Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, where we see a melancholy-looking Denholm Elliott - he's Stefan, but we don't that yet either - presenting his papers to the guards, while weepy string music sweeps over the soundtrack, and in so doing gives our first emotional cue where both the sound and image feel like they're doing the same thing, which is such a relief that it's not even as upsetting as it might be that there is no indication of what's going on or where we are. And this is going to be the mode the film resides in for a long time: scene transitions marked with extremely abrupt ruptures in sound and image, but which give us no anchor on either side of the transition to understand how the scenes fit together, or how the new scene fits with any other scene to have preceded it. In and of itself, this is not necessarily anything particularly special: Roeg's own filmography is packed with movies that are assembling their story through scenes assembled through an initially unclear subjective chronology, like 1973's Don't Look Now or 1976's The Man Who Fell to Earth. But Bad Timing takes it to an extreme that makes even the brilliantly confusing and withholding The Man Who Fell to Earth seem straightforward.
It's easy enough to get at the why of this: we're reliving the details of Milena and Alex's relationship, not in the order that they occurred, but as they filter through the stressed-out minds of the two principals while Milena receives emergency surgery and Alex leaves. Though even that's making it too pat: some of the flashbacks are unmistakably cued to Alex, but none are unmistakably cued to Milena, who is after all in a medical coma while the bulk of the movie is happening, and at a certain point it feels like Bad Timing itself is having the flashbacks itself. But it's all close enough to the same thing: the flashbacks aren't exactly expositing the life story of a bad romance, so much as telling us about the mental state of the two participants right now, why they're having these thoughts in this order at this moment in time, and here's the thing: both Alex and Milena are very mentally unstable people, and indeed this is basically the "story" of Bad Timing, how two people who are probably best off being in no relationships are feeding each other in the most brutal, toxic ways, so that Alex's paranoid, violent possessiveness sends Milena into behaving ever more erratically and messily, perhaps as an attempt to wrest herself away from his control, perhaps as a way of punishing him, and he responds to this by being even more of a controlling, bullying thug. The relationship is, in other words, a long spiral into worse and worse emotional torture, with Milena acting like a bird angrily thrashing about with a broken wing, and Alex as the snake writhing towards her, waiting for the optimal moment to devour her whole.
And these are the minds we're inhabiting through the fragmentary narrative structure, following the development of their relationship as they (or at least Alex) reflects on it. So it's not really surprising that the structure itself feels chaotic and mentally diseased, both in its overall sloppiness - Milena has a flashback inside Alex's flashback at one point, which isn't close to the most aggressive collapse of coherent subjectivity in the film, it's just one that I was very confidently able to parse - and in the sometimes horrible collision of moments produced by cross-cutting between elements, most unpleasantly when (presumably) Alex recalls the first time he had sex with Milena while she's having her throat cut open for an emergency tracheotomy that the filmmakers are film in rather dauntingly unforgiving close-up. My understanding is that the film was written and shot in chronological order, but with the plan that Roeg and editor Tony Lawson would turn it into this hellish kaleidoscope in post, and it's impressive to me that Roeg, a celebrated cinematographer before his turn to directing, would be this adept at crafting a film which relies so much on editing to create virtually all of its effects; the hard lighting and lack of beauty in the film certainly is important, so it's not like the film isn't working in terms of "images" but it is primarily a film about how different, unrelated moments are pressed together in the cut to create psychological horror in the collision of moments.
It's an extraordinarily potent, nerve-wracking experience, 123 minutes spent exploring a bitterly ugly side of human relationships without seeing anything particularly redeeming about the toxic relationship it presents. In Russell's extraordinary performance, Milena at least comes across as pitiable and not fully in control of her impulses, with the actor working in very electrifying, messy mode that involves lots of slurring words and casually flopping her body into poses that offer no graceful way of filming them, and it's the best kind of "looks unrehearsed and roughly improvised but has clearly been worked out in excruciating detail" screen naturalism. So she, at least, feels like a human that we can understand and weep for. Garfunkel's performance comes from an entirely different movie: he's mannered, he's stiff, he feels very conspicuously placed in relation to lights to make his eyes seem oppressive. Given that Garfunkel was not, after all, an actor by trade, it's at least a bit tempting to suppose that Roeg cast him deliberately for his awkward, uncharismatic screen presence and relied on his non-acting, but I think that's being unfair to Garfunkel: there's something very dark in Alex that seems to gurgle its way out of Garfunkel's skinny frame, looming in ways that his physical appearance alone can't account for. One compares this to, for example, his former bandmate Paul Simon's affable shithead in Annie Hall, a film to which these feels like a surprisingly on-point companion piece (fragmentary, flashback-driven portrayal of a fundamentally toxic romantic relationship about over-intellectual types who are smart enough to psychoanalyze themselves but not smart enough not to), and this is much richer: that's the difference between being a small character in a melancholy comedy versus being the antihero of a psychological thriller, in part, but also there's a predatory need in Alex that's awfully powerful to watch. Put together, the two stars of Bad Timing complement each other wonderfully, falling into a very delicate balance where they, as actors have tremendous chemistry together and make it clear why the characters would be attracted to each other, while never, not once in two hours, giving us a reason to root for the onscreen couple to succeed, or to stay apart for longer than one scene.
So it's all pretty bleak and bitter, and one understands completely why the outraged executives of the Rank Organisation, which paid for this, were so disgusted with the thought of releasing it into the world; it was described by one of those executives as "a sick film made by sick people for sick people", and I sure don't see a real counter-argument. It's one thing for the narrative content to be this harsh; the formal expression of that content makes it so much more distressing. And I will say that the film generally grows more straightforwardly comprehensible as it goes along, motivated in part by its narrative form: I haven't mentioned Inspector Netusil, played by Harvey Keitel, because he's very much the film's framework more than its subject, even though he's the third-biggest role, but basically the way that Bad Timing works is that the more Netusil figures out about what put Milena in the hospital, and realizes that this has a lot more to with Alex's actions than Alex is letting on, the more that the cross-cutting flashbacks start to lock into a very clear, linear progression. Which is probably necessary, and also a bit disappointing. Also, the film trades one form of being distressing ("Alex is awful and I hate spending time in his brain") for a different kind of being distressing ("Alex is pure evil and watching his behavior horrifies and disgusts me"), and as result becomes less artful and more just plain cruel. But then, "humans are cruel animals" is basically the film's thesis statement, so that's probably necessary as well. At any rate, the end result of all this is one of the most dazzlingly stylized films I have seen from the whole of the 1980s, and a film that is two hours of nonstop bad vibes, so it kind of feels sickening to be dazzled by it, and watching it feels like the movie hates you for being the kind of person who watches this kind of movie. Maybe not the first thing that screams "that's cinema, baby!" but I don't know, I certainly couldn't tear myself away from the screen.
Categories: arty sex pictures, british cinema, love stories, thrillers
