Bad Timing (1980)

Load of rubbish!!

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

I saw this originally sometime in the mid eighties and thought it was good. Now I appreciate it as a modern great. It doesn't date at all despite Garfunkle's hair and suits. Roeg tells a fairly simple story about complex emotions effecting complicated people and is well served by it's main protagonists and the actors he tasked to play them. The film is well paced and shown in non-linear interludes holding the viewer suspended, picking sides in a relationship and wondering about the consequences which are not fully revealed until the end. The style is typical of the director but that is no bad thing and if you want your cinema provocative and intelligently emotional this is a film you will want to see.

so when I saw this on NetFlix I figured it may be a decent film, suspense set in Vienna.She looks lovely, just prior to minor fame from "Black Widow" (starring with Debra Winger and Terry O'Quinn) where she was excellent as a gold digger and murderess.The sites are intriguing, she is a party girl who leaves a former older lover to date Art Garfunkel, psychiatrist. Yes, its dated in that Garfunkel is not exactly leading man material, even in the early 80's I do not think he was, but anyway.Basically as Milenia, Russell is enjoying her travels, and merely wants to party and have fun, sensual escapades and no strings. Garfunkel however begins to have contempt for her as she will not commit to being only with him.Some cinematography in Tangier is beautiful and sensual. The overall story doesn't work, but you may find it watchable if you are a fan of Russell. There is a twist at the end as well. 6/10

In the 1970s Nicolas Roeg had a reputation as something of an experimental avant-garde director whose style was noted for non-linear narrative, extensive cross-cutting involving the juxtaposition of contrasting images and a brooding sense of menace and foreboding. His first two films as sole director were both excellent ones, "Walkabout" from 1971 and "Don't Look Now" from 1973, but I have never cared for his third film, the overlong, confusing and self-consciously arty "The Man who Fell to Earth"."Bad Timing", made in 1980, was Roeg's fourth film. The narrative is non-linear in the extreme. It opens with a young American woman, Milena Vognic, being rushed to hospital in Vienna after a drug overdose, probably a suicide attempt. In a series of flashbacks we learn about Milena's past- her marriage to her older Czech husband Stefan, from whom she is estranged (it is not made clear whether they are actually divorced), and her stormy relationship with her boyfriend Alex, an American-born lecturer at Vienna University. Intercut with these are scenes showing Milena lying in the hospital and showing Alex being interviewed by a detective who suspects him of foul play.Roeg suffered the misfortune of seeing his film disowned by its distributor, the Rank Organisation, who denounced it as "a film about sick people, made by sick people, for sick people". (I say "misfortune", but I suspect that actually a lot of art-house directors would regard criticism like that as a badge of honour). What upset them was presumably the explicit sex scenes, although Rank really should have known what to expect from Roeg. He was, after all, the man responsible for "Don't Look Now", with its controversial love scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.In one respect, however, Rank's criticism is accurate; "Bad Timing" is indeed a film about "sick people". Milena and Alex are clearly, psychologically speaking, damaged goods. Their relationship is essentially a sadomasochistic one- not physical sadomasochism but a form of emotional sadomasochism involving both mutual desire and mutual loathing. The film can be seen as a psychological case-study; it is significant that psychology is the subject which Alex teaches, and also that the film is set in Vienna, the city of Freud.I have nothing against non-linear narration in principle; it can often be an effective (sometimes the most effective) way of telling a story. It is, moreover, not necessarily a modernist or avant-garde idea. Those who think of it as an invention of the French "Nouvelle Vague" of the sixties should watch John Brahm's "The Locket" from 1946, a film with a particularly intricate "flashback within a flashback within a flashback" structure. (That film was also a psychological case study). In the case of "Bad Timing", however, the film's narrative structure makes it confusing and difficult to follow. Although it aims at a psychological study of the two main characters, we do not learn enough about them to enable us to understand them. I was left wanting to know more about the background to Milena's relationship with Alex (and, even more, about her rather mysterious relationship with Stefan). As the critic of "Variety" put it, most of the milestones are missing from the characters' tortuous psychological route.Another criticism I would have would be the casting of Art Garfunkel as Alex. Much as I admire Garfunkel for his musical achievements, he was not, on the evidence of this film, much of an actor. Roeg clearly liked using rock stars in his films, because the leading role in "The Man who Fell to Earth" is taken by David Bowie, an equally unsuccessful piece of casting. (To be fair to Bowie, he was to give better performances in some of his later films).The gorgeous Theresa Russell, who was later to become Roeg's wife, is better as Milena, and, as is often the case with Roeg, there are some striking visual touches. Overall, however, "Bad Timing" is the sort of experimental film which reminds us that not every experiment, whether in science or the arts, is a successful one. 4/10

Without being a masterpiece this is a surprisingly good film in its genre, and one of the first taking into account that it was made in 1980 and it may be considered one of the fist erotic thrillers. The story of an attempted suicide of a woman (Theresa Russell) and the following investigation where his boyfriend (Art Garfunkel) faces the suspicion of an obsessed detective (Harvey Keitel) is set in a Vienna filmed with taste and style and told in a non-chronological manner that builds the story in an a series of interleaved present and flashback scenes. The best parts of the movie are these where the actors are left to rather freely build the relationship of lust and mis-communication between Russell and Garfunkel, and the suspicion mind-game between Garfunkel and Keitel. Less convincing is the plot itself, it looks like after setting the story and putting the characters in motion the director and script writer did not really know how to end it at the level of interest they succeeded to build. Garfunkel itself in the middle of the story looks a little uncertain, this is by far his most important role on screen but his lack of confidence fits well a character who is supposed to look like he cannot make his mind in a relationship. Although this film came a little too early it set the rules and establish the ground for a niche genre that has developed a few years after it, and despite the aging of some gadgets and equipment and the intense smoking that looks now so outdated :-) by its characters it does not look too tired or rusty, quite the opposite. Actually if I am to compare it with Basic Instinct (certainly with the second one, but maybe also with the first) Bad Timing is a better movie.