Our screening on 20 February will be introduced by novelist and publisher Nicholas Royle, and will be followed by a post-film discussion in the cinema bar.
Bad Timing bookended a decade of extraordinary creativity for Nicolas Roeg that includes Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. In these films, Roeg experimented with montage and sound to explore aspects of identity, memory, trauma, sex and time. Bad Timing represents, perhaps, the purest exhibition of Roeg’s unique style, and thematic concerns.
The film is structured around two intercut timelines. The first unfolds in the present, and concerns the suicide attempt of a young women named Milena (Theresa Russell) and the subsequent investigation into her psychology teaching ex-boyfriend Alex (Art Garfunkel) by police Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel). The second timeline presents a series of roughly chronological scenes depicting the meeting between Milena and Alex, and the subsequent rise and fall of their relationship.
Decried (accurately) as 'a sick film made by sick people for sick people' by its own distributor, Rank, Bad Timing is an abrasive and pessimistic examination of sexuality; an erotic film that is curiously unsensual - in part due to Garfunkel's anti-charismatic performance. It is also, nonetheless, a stylistic tour de force, full of rich symbolic detail and playful combinations of sound/music and imagery.
Content warning: contains a scene of graphic rape.
