Roeg: Bad Timing (1980)

Over the 70s, and especially in the wake of Last Tango in Paris, a particular kind of romantic chamber drama started to emerge, typically centred around sexually liberated characters in the process of retreating to apartments, bedsits and therapists’ couches as the sexual revolution started to subside. Falling back upon the fractured remains of a once collective sexual movement, their stories were typically fragmented, discontinuous and attuned to the unconscious, tendencies which crystallised in Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 experimental masterpiece Bad Timing. Set in Vienna at the height of the Cold War, it’s a romance told retrospectively, opening with the attempted suicide of Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell), an American expat, and moving backwards by way of a police investigation, conducted by local Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel), to describe her relationship with Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel), an American psychoanalyst and self-professed voyeur with a particular interest in spying, secrecy and scopophilia. At first, it plays as a somewhat regular flashback film, impressionistic and non-linear in a manageable way, but Roeg gradually dislocates and dissociates each episode from the next, until it’s a bit like watching a film set at the critical cusp in any psychoanalytic intervention – the moment at which the patient goes from recounting his or her life to the therapist  as a functionary to actually engaging with and romancing the therapist as a fantasy. For that reason, the relationship between Milena and Linden only really makes sense in the midst of crisis – or seems in crisis even at its most relaxed and organic – a crisis that Roeg suggests rather than elaborates through his increasingly dissonant cuts and transitions, which often hinge on unlikely spatial and temporal analogues between apparently unrelated scenes, suffused with a Cold War taste for unexpected and paranoid propinquities. As in Woody Allen’s films, the convergence of romance and therapy turns dialogue into something of a talking cure, as Milena and Alex continually try to talk themselves out of the relationship, or to talk the relationship itself through to the bitter end, until it really feels like two competing monologues, two people talking past each other through accumulating layers of transference and counter-transference. Yet where Allen might opt for flamboyant, baroque verbiage, here the dialogue feels more and more subsumed into intimate silence even as it becomes more and more hostile, thanks in large part to Garfunkel’s voice – the chamber voice par excellence – which often feels more like a voiceover than a voice, moving in and out of the diegesis like bridge and troubled waters all at once. As in a live concert in which a familiar or standard piece is reworked, spontaneously, into something utterly unfamiliar, his performance – along with Russell’s – feels as if it was shot in sequence only to be hastily rearranged and reassembled at the last minute, which is perhaps why the film feels so fresh in its dissonances and bad timings as well, so close to the director’s final vision of how it should be, even if that vision tends to disperse any destination as it proceeds. The result is an open-ended therapy-time that can't - or won't - quite allow the film to ever arrive at any point of catharsis or consummation, forcing us to spend more and more time in Roeg's cuts themselves, as they confound all sense of past and present, trauma and symptom, raw footage and editorial intervention, with a disjunctive vigour that's as exhilarating as it is disorienting to hear Garfunkel without Simon in this most baroque, introspective and precious of chamber dramas.