RResende Roeg has a troubled mind. Or at least is fond of entering troubled minds. His biggest quality is something i value a lot in a filmmaker: he paints his canvas, but he also designates where we seat to look at it. He builds the atmosphere and makes us a spaceship to enter it. That's our feeling. But than there's something more interesting he does. We think we are comfortable as the designated watchers of what he depicts, but what he does, mostly through camera work and editing (which is great in this film) is trying to push us into the game, and going through the same risks and trouble of the characters in the film. That will to place the viewer at the center of what matters is commonly tried these days, but i think Roeg was a visionary in his days, and that includes this film.We have a psychoanalyst, which is a shortcut for saying he is someone who works relations inside out. He is obsessed, has retroactive jealousy, and the film is the evolution of how he fights himself to make a convenient story that allows him to be with the woman, something he eventually fails to do. We know how the thing ends from the beginning, so the film uses the form of allowing us to know the ending point and than driving as in flashback to that point. The editing is frantic and somehow psychedelic, something Roeg might have learned in his London 60' experience. And the intention was precisely to make our visual mind work like the troubled mind of Garfunkel's character.An extra significant point, something Ted Goranson really likes to notice, and which i'm starting to fall for is the empathy Roeg has with the actress, Theresa Russell, which would lead to marriage. You really can understand that. Her character is not the center of the story, it's all about Garfunkel, but we miss that unless we think about that. Garfunkel's character was at this point a representative of Roeg's urges for this beautiful woman.The film that best portrays this relation, and simultaneously is Roeg's best, to me, is Insignificance. This Bad Timing is one of his most celebrated, but it has minor power compared to the other one. It's a good experience, but i suggest you use it as an introduction to the other.My opinion: 3/5 http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com insignificance

James Hitchcock In the 1970s Nicolas Roeg had a reputation as something of an experimental avant-garde director whose style was noted for non-linear narrative, extensive cross-cutting involving the juxtaposition of contrasting images and a brooding sense of menace and foreboding. His first two films as sole director were both excellent ones, "Walkabout" from 1971 and "Don't Look Now" from 1973, but I have never cared for his third film, the overlong, confusing and self-consciously arty "The Man who Fell to Earth"."Bad Timing", made in 1980, was Roeg's fourth film. The narrative is non-linear in the extreme. It opens with a young American woman, Milena Vognic, being rushed to hospital in Vienna after a drug overdose, probably a suicide attempt. In a series of flashbacks we learn about Milena's past- her marriage to her older Czech husband Stefan, from whom she is estranged (it is not made clear whether they are actually divorced), and her stormy relationship with her boyfriend Alex, an American-born lecturer at Vienna University. Intercut with these are scenes showing Milena lying in the hospital and showing Alex being interviewed by a detective who suspects him of foul play.Roeg suffered the misfortune of seeing his film disowned by its distributor, the Rank Organisation, who denounced it as "a film about sick people, made by sick people, for sick people". (I say "misfortune", but I suspect that actually a lot of art-house directors would regard criticism like that as a badge of honour). What upset them was presumably the explicit sex scenes, although Rank really should have known what to expect from Roeg. He was, after all, the man responsible for "Don't Look Now", with its controversial love scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.In one respect, however, Rank's criticism is accurate; "Bad Timing" is indeed a film about "sick people". Milena and Alex are clearly, psychologically speaking, damaged goods. Their relationship is essentially a sadomasochistic one- not physical sadomasochism but a form of emotional sadomasochism involving both mutual desire and mutual loathing. The film can be seen as a psychological case-study; it is significant that psychology is the subject which Alex teaches, and also that the film is set in Vienna, the city of Freud.I have nothing against non-linear narration in principle; it can often be an effective (sometimes the most effective) way of telling a story. It is, moreover, not necessarily a modernist or avant-garde idea. Those who think of it as an invention of the French "Nouvelle Vague" of the sixties should watch John Brahm's "The Locket" from 1946, a film with a particularly intricate "flashback within a flashback within a flashback" structure. (That film was also a psychological case study). In the case of "Bad Timing", however, the film's narrative structure makes it confusing and difficult to follow. Although it aims at a psychological study of the two main characters, we do not learn enough about them to enable us to understand them. I was left wanting to know more about the background to Milena's relationship with Alex (and, even more, about her rather mysterious relationship with Stefan). As the critic of "Variety" put it, most of the milestones are missing from the characters' tortuous psychological route.Another criticism I would have would be the casting of Art Garfunkel as Alex. Much as I admire Garfunkel for his musical achievements, he was not, on the evidence of this film, much of an actor. Roeg clearly liked using rock stars in his films, because the leading role in "The Man who Fell to Earth" is taken by David Bowie, an equally unsuccessful piece of casting. (To be fair to Bowie, he was to give better performances in some of his later films).The gorgeous Theresa Russell, who was later to become Roeg's wife, is better as Milena, and, as is often the case with Roeg, there are some striking visual touches. Overall, however, "Bad Timing" is the sort of experimental film which reminds us that not every experiment, whether in science or the arts, is a successful one. 4/10

jaibo 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. It features brilliant performances from all of the cast, most notably Russell - few actresses can achieve the kind of freewheeling and real sensuality that she achieves so seemingly effortlessly here.Set mostly in Vienna, the film takes the psychologists need to control and coral the instincts and life force of a living human woman to be ultimately murderous. One is never quite sure whether Harvey Keitel's detective is a manifestation of guilt and the super-ego or a real on-the-trail policeman; in the end it doesn't matter, as the man in question is forced to face his own reality as a life-denying entity.The ending, as with Performance, shows a fragile human consciousness being driven off to their doom in a car which appears to be the manifestation of a post-modern world in which they are desperately lost.

lionelduffy 'Bad Timing's jagged format, beautiful Viennese setting and Keith Jarrett-led, opulent score create a movie thats as mysterious as it is menacing. A plot comes, is alluded to, told intermittently in flashbacks and arcs and splutters to conclusion but its very much a film of photography and technique. Roeg's structureless style overwhelms a perhaps miscast Harvey Keitel, a struggling (as always) Art Garfunkel (the one pop-star casting Roeg didn't get spot on) and a ravishing Theresa Russell but ultimately wins out as the film lingers long and tantalizingly out of reach long after viewing. The fifth of five in Roeg's golden period and in many ways the most intriguing.