"A cigarette," said Oscar Wilde, "is the perfect type of the perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied." Bad Timing's psychologist Alex Linden (Garfunkel) would no doubt describe his ex-lover, the brazen blonde Milena Flaherty (Russell) in exactly the same glowing terms.
It's also a charge critics have levelled at Bad Timing since 1980 (they usually leave the 'exquisite' bit off), citing its "pseudo-intellectualism", along with a subplot featuring Denholm Elliot that runs out of wool - though he does comically pop his head round thedoor at the end, in yet another case of 'bad timing'.
But back to the cigarettes for a moment: this film is absolutely choking, fair reeking in ciggie smoke; over 40 cigarettes have the life sucked out of them during the two-hour running time. "I wanted them all to smoke," said director Nic Roeg. "Nervousness." Smokers (who ought not to attempt a Withnail And I-style 'smoking game' lest they pass out and choke to death on their own nicotiney vomit) are advised to watch it from the comfort of the living room with an enormous ashtray to hand.
The cigarettes aren't just a handy visual shorthand for obsessive compulsion, which is the meat and potatoes of Bad Timing, they also form a crucial part of the evidence that will damn Alex. Having discovered a suicidal Milena (Russell) expiring from a booze and pills overdose, "a very advanced toxic condition," as the medics have it, why would he (apparently) pass the time puffing away, filling her ashtray with butts for over an hour before calling the ambulance round? It's the job of Inspector Netusil (Keitel), Alex's inquisitor-cum-conscience, to find out what really happened in that mysterious 60-minute window.
What Netusil intuits, and what is finally revealed to us - no lesser voyeurs than the characters herein - is predictable if unflinchingly graphic (you may never hear 'Bright Eyes' the same way again). The cause of the film's one-time censorship (Bad Timing's sickened producers Rank banned it from their own Odeon cinemas) was succinctly summed up by Big Audio Dynamite in their unlikely chart hit 'E = MC2', Mick Jones' homage to Roeg's films: "She's my flame too hot to hold, had to settle for her cold."
Set in Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, Bad Timing has been described as "Freudian cinema with a vengeance"; Hitchcock with knobs on. Alternately draggy, horrible, then almost unbearable to watch, it's permeated with the kind of decadence, anguished eroticism and self-analysis (cue much poring over the Lüscher Colour Test) associated with fin-de-siècle Vienna: the paintings of Freud's contemporaries Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are featured heavily, as is Roeg's trademark non-linear, free-associative direction, less effective here than in Don't Look Now.
Depending on one's tolerance for shouty, duvet-chewing acting, the lead performances will either grimly fascinate (perhaps evoking happy memories of past doomed relationships), possibly amuse, or most likely irritate beyond belief, until you're seized by the desire to violently bang the heads of everyone involved together.
As Alex, Garfunkel is a modern monster. A neat freak and control freak-turned-voyeur (early in the film, he observes to his student class that "a guilt-ridden voyeur is usually a political conservative") his idea of a chat-up line is, "If we don't meet, there's always the possibility it could have been perfect." Or, on the lovers in Klimt's 'The Kiss', "They're happy... because they don't know each other well enough yet." It's a wonder he manages to get anyone in the sack, alive or half-dead.
For Alex, who desires to dominate with rationalism, Milena is simply another case study to be observed, enjoyed at leisure, tagged and ultimately cast back into the community on a long leash. He's only a masochist's idea of a bridge over troubled water. Fortunately for Alex, Milena is just such a masochist: neurotic, chaotic, living for the moment and prone to hurling beer bottles off the windowsill in a drunken fury while dressed as a kind of prostitute-clown.
A pivotal, and pretty representative exchange, sees a hopeful Alex nipping round, our blousey anti-heroine atypically fending him off as she's not in the mood, Alex storming out, Milena chasing after him and offering herself to him on the apartment stairs. Wasting no time, our shrink plunges straight in, then saunters off without a by-or-leave, while Milena trudges miserably back indoors. As a sympathetic Netusil, like the chairman at a male assertiveness meeting, despairs, "They're dangerous creatures, to themselves and others... they try to drag us into their confusion and chaos." Poor old Alex can only seethe unhappily at his shoes, as an unconscious Milena gets a bloody tracheotomy pipe plugged into her neck.
This is one of the bleakest films in Roeg's canon, which is saying something; ushered in to the grizzled strains of Tom Waits' 'Invitation To The Blues', and closing with Billie Holiday's 'The Same Old Story', via Daltrey and Townshend's 'Who Are You' - although Elvis Costello's 'Two Little Hitlers' would have worked just as well: "Two Little Hitlers will fight it out until/one little Hitler does the other one's will."
It's also a charge critics have levelled at Bad Timing since 1980 (they usually leave the 'exquisite' bit off), citing its "pseudo-intellectualism", along with a subplot featuring Denholm Elliot that runs out of wool - though he does comically pop his head round thedoor at the end, in yet another case of 'bad timing'.
But back to the cigarettes for a moment: this film is absolutely choking, fair reeking in ciggie smoke; over 40 cigarettes have the life sucked out of them during the two-hour running time. "I wanted them all to smoke," said director Nic Roeg. "Nervousness." Smokers (who ought not to attempt a Withnail And I-style 'smoking game' lest they pass out and choke to death on their own nicotiney vomit) are advised to watch it from the comfort of the living room with an enormous ashtray to hand.
The cigarettes aren't just a handy visual shorthand for obsessive compulsion, which is the meat and potatoes of Bad Timing, they also form a crucial part of the evidence that will damn Alex. Having discovered a suicidal Milena (Russell) expiring from a booze and pills overdose, "a very advanced toxic condition," as the medics have it, why would he (apparently) pass the time puffing away, filling her ashtray with butts for over an hour before calling the ambulance round? It's the job of Inspector Netusil (Keitel), Alex's inquisitor-cum-conscience, to find out what really happened in that mysterious 60-minute window.
What Netusil intuits, and what is finally revealed to us - no lesser voyeurs than the characters herein - is predictable if unflinchingly graphic (you may never hear 'Bright Eyes' the same way again). The cause of the film's one-time censorship (Bad Timing's sickened producers Rank banned it from their own Odeon cinemas) was succinctly summed up by Big Audio Dynamite in their unlikely chart hit 'E = MC2', Mick Jones' homage to Roeg's films: "She's my flame too hot to hold, had to settle for her cold."
Set in Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, Bad Timing has been described as "Freudian cinema with a vengeance"; Hitchcock with knobs on. Alternately draggy, horrible, then almost unbearable to watch, it's permeated with the kind of decadence, anguished eroticism and self-analysis (cue much poring over the Lüscher Colour Test) associated with fin-de-siècle Vienna: the paintings of Freud's contemporaries Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are featured heavily, as is Roeg's trademark non-linear, free-associative direction, less effective here than in Don't Look Now.
Depending on one's tolerance for shouty, duvet-chewing acting, the lead performances will either grimly fascinate (perhaps evoking happy memories of past doomed relationships), possibly amuse, or most likely irritate beyond belief, until you're seized by the desire to violently bang the heads of everyone involved together.
As Alex, Garfunkel is a modern monster. A neat freak and control freak-turned-voyeur (early in the film, he observes to his student class that "a guilt-ridden voyeur is usually a political conservative") his idea of a chat-up line is, "If we don't meet, there's always the possibility it could have been perfect." Or, on the lovers in Klimt's 'The Kiss', "They're happy... because they don't know each other well enough yet." It's a wonder he manages to get anyone in the sack, alive or half-dead.
For Alex, who desires to dominate with rationalism, Milena is simply another case study to be observed, enjoyed at leisure, tagged and ultimately cast back into the community on a long leash. He's only a masochist's idea of a bridge over troubled water. Fortunately for Alex, Milena is just such a masochist: neurotic, chaotic, living for the moment and prone to hurling beer bottles off the windowsill in a drunken fury while dressed as a kind of prostitute-clown.
A pivotal, and pretty representative exchange, sees a hopeful Alex nipping round, our blousey anti-heroine atypically fending him off as she's not in the mood, Alex storming out, Milena chasing after him and offering herself to him on the apartment stairs. Wasting no time, our shrink plunges straight in, then saunters off without a by-or-leave, while Milena trudges miserably back indoors. As a sympathetic Netusil, like the chairman at a male assertiveness meeting, despairs, "They're dangerous creatures, to themselves and others... they try to drag us into their confusion and chaos." Poor old Alex can only seethe unhappily at his shoes, as an unconscious Milena gets a bloody tracheotomy pipe plugged into her neck.
This is one of the bleakest films in Roeg's canon, which is saying something; ushered in to the grizzled strains of Tom Waits' 'Invitation To The Blues', and closing with Billie Holiday's 'The Same Old Story', via Daltrey and Townshend's 'Who Are You' - although Elvis Costello's 'Two Little Hitlers' would have worked just as well: "Two Little Hitlers will fight it out until/one little Hitler does the other one's will."