Evening Standard British Film Award |
| Best Actor |
ALFS Award |
| Director of the Year |
People's Choice Award |
Roeg has a troubled mind. Or at least is fond of entering troubled minds.
"Bad Timing" is a film you'll either love or hate. Many of the reviews give it high praise and have very high ratings...
"Bad Timing" follows Alex, an American psychology professor in Vienna who meets and swiftly falls in love with Milena, a twenty something sophisticated military brat, also from the United States. Their romance is a whirlwind, but Milena's free-spirited way of life soon ignited resentment and jealousy in Alex, who starts to obsessively stalk her.
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.
Nicolas Roeg anatomises a love affair, and then re-arranges the pieces to create an affective display. The film is visceral, poetic, dizzying and provocative, moving, sexy and repulsive by turns.
Nicolas Roeg has never exactly been a conventional director. Bad Timing is one of his most complex works.
The setting is Vienna. A young American woman (Theresa Russell) is brought to a hospital after overdosing on pills, apparently in a suicide attempt.
From slap-happy, smitten Film Noir dicks onward, the cinematic equivalent of a girl that's just no good or a "no good dame" is usually one who's simply too good to be true. And when a loose, liberal young lady from America - in the usually idyllic dreamland of Vienna - hooks up with a loose yet intellectual American professor who thinks he's more liberal-minded than he actually is, things go from...
His movie rates high in production value and acting and has an innovative approach to an old story The film is basically a character study Alex (Art Garfunkel) is a depressingly dark and shadowy American psychoanalyst living in Vienna Theresa Russell plays Milena, a resonant, carefree American girl They meet by chance at a party and are thrown into a roller-coaster ride of an erotic relationship He wants to smash her free spirit because he can't understand it, but she won't let him The result is a near-fatal break-up Roeg comes close to the story from the middle (obeying Jean-Luc Godard's authoritative saying, a film "must have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." We quickly move to the different parts of Alex and Milena's relationship, moving through time as if it were Jell-O.
