Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

From one perspective, the use of Billie Holliday’s “It’s the Same Old Story” over the closing credits of Bad Timing might seem like a rather tritely ironic take on the disturbing narrative we’ve just witnessed, an implication that every dreamy love story is just one twist away from comparable sickness. But the song’s greater resonance is in the invocation of stasis and repetition, of events being drawn toward a singularity or vanishing point. At one point, Theresa Russell’s Milena expresses a wish that Art Garfunkel’s Linden would understand her less and love her more, or put another way, join her in following the emotional and sensual demands of the moment over those of a structured narrative (Linden is a research psychoanalyst who we pointedly see at work in Vienna’s Sigmund Freud museum). The film works toward a particularly nasty granting of her wish, circling around a moment where Linden indeed submits to the demands of a key moment, but at the cost of completely objectifying and dehumanizing her, even of bringing her to the brink of death. The third main character, Harvey Keitel’s detective, doesn’t so much investigate the event as will himself into being a displaced participant in it, seemingly seeing in Linden’s transgression some kind of terrible, humbling artistry (that of the director behind it?). Several scenes take place on the border between Austria and (as it was then) Czechoslovakia, on the border between freedoms and ideologies, and Linden periodically does profiling work for the US army, an underdeveloped strand that nevertheless feeds a sense of paranoid destabilization. For all the fragmented evasiveness of the film’s structure, Roeg’s visuals are direct and intimidating and accusatory: it isn’t a particularly “pleasant” watch by conventional measures, its prevailing tone drawing heavily on Garfunkel’s snotty, self-righteous Linden, but that’s just another measure of Roeg’s aesthetic fearlessness during his peak period.