00:00I have a creeper, va darada
00:06espetra
00:10espetra
00:21la la straera
00:33No British film I know is further away from the literary and theatrical traditions which
00:39dogged and still dog cinema on these islands more than bad timing which we're about to
00:44watch. It was produced by Jeremy Thomas, one of the few real movie producers in this country,
00:50who also brought Cronenberg's Crash and Naked Lunch and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence to
00:56the screen. It stars Teresa Russell in her first lead role at the age of 23, Harvey Keitel as the
01:03investigator Netusel cast just one week before filming and Art Garfunkel as the almost necrophiliac
01:10like James Stewart's character Scotty in Vertigo. It's as if Garfunkel hated so much his Simon
01:21Garfunkel hyper melodic image that he decided in this character Alex to drop an atom bomb on it.
01:29The film was directed by Nicholas Roeg, the former cinematographer who shot Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451,
01:35which was shown in last year's movie drone and the train explosion sequence in that long tedious film
01:41Lawrence of Arabia. Roeg soon became Teresa Russell's husband. As a young man Roeg saw a film being
01:48dubbed into French and loved the way the action would go forward and back, forward and back,
01:54until the actor got the timing right. He says that this made him think of cinema as a kind of
01:59time
01:59machine and it seems to have drawn his attention to the pleasures of fragmented bits of action,
02:04of moments intensified by repetition. So it is with this incredible film we're about to watch,
02:12which is like a Douglas Sirk melodrama attacked by Edward Scissorhands. It's two hours of intense
02:18moments in the lives of Garfunkel, Russell with whom he's obsessed, her probable husband Denim Elliott,
02:25and Keitel's detective who's trying to find out why Russell has committed suicide.
02:30Dr. Lyndon, will you be coming back here or going home? After the cigarettes?
02:36I thought I was free to do it, whatever I like.
02:39Absolutely. It's just to know where, later on, to give you any news if necessary.
02:48All Roeg's films before bad timing, some of the most daring ever made in this country,
02:52seem to say the same thing. The experience of being alive at any moment is a kind of dazzling
02:58implosion of everything we've experienced and everything we might experience. Again and again
03:04in performance in 1970, Walkabout in 71, and The Man Who Fell to Earth in 76, lonely, alienated, fearful,
03:13and dangerous people, remember painful or glorious times, or foresee hell and heaven in the future.
03:22The themes are the impossibility of love, the play of coincidence, the lost moment, and the agony of what might
03:29have been.
03:35Roeg's fragmented, associative way of making movies means that the final results can be confusing,
03:40and if this is your first time watching bad timing, you might at first find it hard to piece together.
03:46Why, for example, do Garfunkel and Keitel have the same picture on their walls?
03:51Why all those close-ups of brooches and cigarettes and objects?
03:55Why the river at the end?
03:58The film contains many such puzzles, but in the end, after having seen it a few times,
04:03you begin to feel its incredible heat.
04:06A whole group of my friends fell in love with it, and with Theresa Russell.
04:11Before we'd properly had love affairs ourselves, it warned us of how brutally such experiences could affect us,
04:18how we, especially the men, could behave like monsters within them.
04:24Hopefully you've never suffered as Russell's character suffers in the next two hours.
04:28Hopefully you're not as dangerous as Garfunkel, as attracted to his dangerous Keitel.
04:34If you're anything like me, you'll watch this film again and again, year after year.
04:39You'll get to the stage that, wherever you are in the world, in your life,
04:44when you hear Tom Waits's invitation to the blues from the film's beginning,
04:49or think of its extraordinary ending, you'll freeze as if someone has walked over your grave.
04:56Bad timing can do that to you.
