Bad
Timing; Directed by Nicolas Roeg
A [TORONTO FILM] FESTIVAL DATE WITH AN ILL-FATED LOVE AFFAIR
Maclean's
September
22, 1980
By John Gault
At some time in the lives of most of us there occurs a star-crossed love affair, one that burns with the intensity of a solar flare and bounces madly between the extremities of ecstasy and despair. It is irrational, mutually destructive and usually vicious, but there's not one damn thing we can do about it--or would do about it if we could. Ultimately, of course, it ends, and the survivors (if there are any) go on to other, more sensible relationships and, years later, think back to the time when they felt so wholly and electrically alive.
It was impossible. But maybe it wasn't, really. Maybe the timing was just bad. Thus Bad Timinga film that throws battery acid on the human psyche and lays bare the very worst in all of us. He is Dr. Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel), New York Jewish, 40ish, professor of psychoanalysis, cerebral and methodical and unremittingly conventional. She is Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell), 21, and California golden, visceral and impulsive and promiscuous. They meet in Vienna--such a perfect trysting place for two emotional exiles--and fall hard into love. And immediately the affair begins twisting sickly to its inevitable conclusion: neither will change because neither can, and we can only watch in horror and humiliation as they stagger across one another's paths on their way to final debasement, terrible for her and much, much worse for him.
Garfunkel, who showed considerable acting skill in Carnal Knowledge, plays this role as if he's actually lived it. Russell, a virtual unknown despite her work in The Last Tycoon and Straight Time, raises the role of virgin-whore to a new level; she is a cinch Oscar-winner. Then there is Harvey Keitel, brilliant as usual, playing a police inspector with his own obsession: the need to reaffirm that the souls of others are as corrupt as his own.
With Bad Timing, certainly the most contentious of the Toronto festival's galas, director Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Don't Look Now) surpasses all previous efforts and achieves, simply, greatness. This is not just another film about obsessive and perverse relationships, it is the film--the most thoroughly adult movie ever made in the English language.