Like too many aspects of ''Bad Timing,'' this point is elaborately detailed, repeated frequently, and barely of any interest at all. The crime is uncovered by a detective, played by Harvey Keitel, whose movements are carefully integrated with Alex's, as if to establish a parallel, a duet, a duel. And Alex is driven to commit a crime of passion, which is meant to be shocking, but hardly seems disturbing at all. Roeg accomplishes by letting sand pour out of a hollowed-out stone in Vienna, then cutting to the desert. In a typically strained flourish, Alex and Milena are transported to Morocco, a transition Mr. Roeg goes to great lengths to make ''Bad Timing'' as exotic as he can. Even in its moments of greatest urgency, their affair remains lukewarm.
Garfunkel are given ample opportunity to connect, but they never manage this. Roeg allows her to repeat herself, and eventually monotony sets in. Her performance is hugely effective for a while, but Mr. Miss Russell makes gestures that involve her whole body, gestures that are almost frighteningly carefree she is also capable of making almost any kind of behavior seem lewd. And Miss Russell, who has also made memorable appearances in ''Straight Time'' and ''The Last Tycoon,'' brings to her role a reckless physicality that is both overwhelming and overused. Garfunkel does a very creditable job of conveying Alex's reserve, but there is little in his performance to suggest a man in the grip of an obsession. ''If we're going to meet, it might as well be now,'' she says, blocking the doctor's exit with her leg. Alex, a celebrated professor of psychology, encounters Milena at a party, where she looks drunk and behaves brazenly this is virtually her constant condition during the course of the film.
Garfunkel, and Milena Flaherty, played by Miss Russell, are too often an unremarkable team. Roeg's confidence in the shaky proposition that these two characters hold a fascination for his audience. The problems of ''Bad Timing'' can be traced, in part, to a screenplay that ascribes equal importance to all the incidentals of the love affair they also stem from Mr. Scrambled flashbacks help complicate this tale, which begins as a tepid romance and ends with a tepid crime. Though the title refers to the vagaries of their relationship, it could just as easily denote the pattern of the story's exposition. Roeg's casting of David Bowie with Candy Clark, Mick Jagger with Anita Pallenberg, and Donald Sutherland with Julie Christie, play Americans who meet in Vienna and become involved in a sexually explicit, but not particularly torrid affair. Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell, echoing Mr. Once again, he teams a fragilelooking man with a woman of exceptional abandon. today, and will open at the Sutton tomorrow), has a great deal in common with Mr.
#Bad timing series#
And it manages to seem both weighty and insubstantial.Ĭertainly ''Bad Timing,'' which opens the ''British Film Now'' series (it will be shown at the Paramount Theater at 5 and 8 P.M. Roeg's ''Performance,'' ''Walkabout,'' ''Don't Look Now'' and ''The Man Who Fell to Earth,'' has a ponderous, trumped-up feeling. Nicolas Roeg, who habitually structures his films this way, has again relied on jumbled time sequences, allusive cutting and a wealth of similar techniques to give ''Bad Timing/A Sensual Obsession'' its suggestive, secretive air.
When a film is structured like a puzzle, qualities that are merely bewildering can be made to seem mysterious, if only for a while.