Bad Timing movie review & film summary (1980)

With "Bad Timing," though, it's hard to say why Roeg decided to begin at the end and jump around in chronology. The movie contains no revelations that look different the second time around, and so the editing seems merely fancy footwork, or Roeg showing us that he had done this before and can do it again.

One other possible motive for the extremely complex editing in "Bad Timing" may be Roeg's desire to camouflage the fact that his story would be thin and his characters shallow if they were just seen straight through from beginning to end.

The movie is about a relationship between two Americans who meet in Vienna. Why Vienna? Why not Vienna? Art Garfunkel plays a psychoanalyst and Theresa Russellplays a sexually uninhibited young woman who is an alcoholic and pill addict. Garfunkel, however, does not see her as a sick person, but as an exciting conquest. Although the audience can see that she's clearly in desperate physical and mental trouble, Garfunkel's analyst takes advantage of her confusion to move in and establish a sexual relationship.

It's not, mind you, that she objects to sleeping with him. Indeed, she makes the first overture at a party. It's just that the kind of man who would sleep with a woman in that condition (especially if his professional training equipped him to understand her condition) would qualify as an insect. Perhaps the blame is not entirely the analyst's: Nothing in this movie indicates that Roeg has any particular understanding of the fact that his heroine is desperately ill.

And that may be where the film's troubles begin. I suspect that this particular story cannot be told straight through, from beginning to end, without dealing honestly with the nature of the relationship. Since Roeg is unwilling, unable or unequipped to do that, he hides the relationship in a thicket of stylistic fireworks.