Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm
This is an Animus magazine presentation of a 35mm screening. There will be an introduction by legendary producer Jeremy Thomas (schedule permitting).
As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or,
possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly
distributed at the time.
It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the
studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a
disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting;
masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated
with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat.
The ending stayed with me for quite some time. Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.
Time Out review:
One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece
jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between
two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the
girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine
enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst
lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller
investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in
visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now
sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a
case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing,
less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at
one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters.
Don Macpherson
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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