1980 Week: Bad Timing

          Equal parts intellectual, provocateur, and sensualist, British cinematographer-turned-director Nicolas Roeg built a singular filmography during the active years of his career. (As of this writing, he’s semi-retired.) Known for his downbeat themes, fragmented storytelling, and startling depictions of sexuality, Roeg made a number of films that divided audiences, with advocates praising his inventive artistry and detractors labeling him a pretentious voyeur. As in all things, the truth probably lies somewhere between those extremes. In any event, while Roeg’s most celebrated works include Performance (1970), which he codirected, and Don’t Look Now (1973), the deliberately unpleasant Bad Timing occupies an important place in his ouevre. A challenging narrative puzzle that builds steadily toward one of the creepiest sex scenes in the history of mainstream cinema, the picture is unapologetically obtuse and unrepentantly adult. Sometimes known by the extended title Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, the movie explores a dark place where carnality and madness intersect.

          Singer/actor Art Garfunkel stars as Alex Linden, an American professor living and working in Vienna. Alex is introduced at a hospital where beautiful young American Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell) has been admitted for a possible suicide attempt involving drugs. Police Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel) interrogates Alex about Milena, deducing that they’re lovers and suspecting that Alex knows more about Milena’s circumstances than he’s willing to share. Roeg presents the storyline as a complicated mosaic, jumping between different periods of the Alex/Milena relationship in order to paint a portrait of a love affair gone wrong. In scenes depicting the couple’s early courtship, the uptight Alex finds Milena’s impulsiveness and volatility exciting. Later in their relationship, he becomes judgmental and possessive, resenting that she’s married to an older man named Stefan Vognic (Denholm Elliot) and screaming at her whenever he discovers she’s taken another lover. All of this culminates on the fateful night of Milena’s overdose, when Alex’s twisted devotion manifests in grotesque behavior.

          Bad Timing is powerful in fits and starts, even though long stretches are dull because they comprise awful people yelling at each other. Worse, the detective angle never quite works, and Keitel’s performance is artificial and mannered, whereas everyone else strives for naturalism. Garfunkel channels something grim and savage with his understated performance, so whenever Garfunkel’s character lets his unsavory side show, the effect is bracing. Russell, who subsequently married Roeg and starred in several more films for him, attacks scenes vigorously and lacks inhibition, which helps smooth over the bumpier aspects of her performance. Bad Timing is not as effective as it could and should have been, because the chilly aesthetic created by Roeg and writer Yale Udoff keeps viewers a safe distance away from the psychological brutality occurring onscreen. Every so often, however, the movie lands a body blow and leaves a nasty mark.

Bad Timing: FUNKY

Performance (1970)

          Some releases from the year 1970 barely qualify as ’70s movies, not only because they were filmed and/or completed in 1969 but because the style and themes of the movies are tethered to the preceding decade. Performance epitomizes this conundrum even more than most 1970 releases, since the picture was actually made in 1968 but not commercially distributed until two years later. Nonetheless, because of the date on which it reached screens and because of important connections to various threads of ’70s cinema—notably the picture’s status as the directorial debut of English provocateur Nicolas Roeg—Performance merits consideration in this space. If I sound reluctant to engage with this particular film, I have my reasons. Having seen Performance two or three times over the years, I’ve always found the thing to be boring, indulgent, and silly. Yet at the same time, I regularly meet intellectually formidable people who revere the movie. So even though Performance is not remotely to my liking, I acknowledge the film’s unique power over certain discriminating viewers.

          Produced in the UK and co-directed by Roeg, who also served as cinematographer (his former profession), and Donald Cammell, who wrote the bizarre script, Performance depicts the collision of two unlikely characters. One of them is Chas (James Fox), a thug in the employ of a London gangster; the very first scene gives us a hint of his kinky inclinations, because he’s shown having a bondage-filled sexcapade with a girlfriend. After a criminal scheme goes awry, Chas flees his neighborhood for the safety of a different part of town, giving friends time to seek a passport for his planned travel to America. Dyeing his hair and adopting a fake name (the first of many games the film plays with identity), Chas seeks lodging in a flat owned by Turner (Mick Jagger), a onetime rock star now living as a recluse with two girlfriends, Lucy (Michele Breton) and Pherber (Anita Pallenberg).

          Whereas Chas’ old life was decidedly conventional—natty suits, short hair, tidy grooming, and heterosexual dating—Turner’s existence blurs cultural lines. Not only does Turner seem willing to have sex with anything that moves, but Turner also wears feminine clothes and makeup while lounging about his house in a perpetually drugged state. Determined to remain out of sight from the hoodlums who are pursuing him, Chas spends all his time with Turner and the ladies, eventually sampling the household’s various carnal, hallucinogenic, pharmaceutical, and sartorial delights. By the end of his time in the strange enclave—which is decorated like a cross between an opium den and a whorehouse—Chas has indulged in cross-dressing, drugs, and (perhaps) gay sex.

          The “perhaps” in the preceding sentence brings us to the defining aspect of Performance, which is the disjointed and surreal storytelling style Cammell and Roeg embraced not only here but also in their subsequent films. (After this collaborative endeavor, the duo separated; Roeg enjoyed a significant career, but Cammell remained a cult figure.) Right from the start, Performance is filled with tricky edits and shots that distort perception—sometimes it’s hard to tell when something is happening, sometimes it’s difficult to determine exactly what’s happening, and at all times, it’s anybody’s guess why things are happening. Especially when the movie gets completely bizarre toward the end, with a drug-addled sequence of Jagger singing in character to a roomful of naked gangsters while Cammell and Roeg splice in shots from the past, the future, and who-knows-where, Performance becomes the cinematic equivalent of a drug experience. All of this is compounded by a mind-fuck of an ending that combines murder and the possible transference of identity.

          I’m sure devoted fans of the movie can defend Performance’s fragmented storyline in at least two ways (by offering a linear explanation or by saying that the movie explores themes that run deeper than linear understanding), but for me, Performance still seems garish, noisy, and overwrought. What I won’t argue with, however, is the notion that Performance is a film of ambition and substance. Whether you dig it, therefore, depends on how effectively the filmmakers seduce you into deciphering their narrative hieroglyphics.

Performance: FREAKY

Don’t Look Now (1973)

          Adventurous director Nicolas Roeg’s breakthrough movie, the sexually charged psychological thriller Don’t Look Now, is one of those rare films that enjoys both cult-fave notoriety and deep critical respect. Yet try as I might, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the thing, despite having watched it at different times of life. The picture feels intelligent and provocative, so it’s possible I’m missing something, but Don’t Look Now’s opaque storyline and its perverse preoccupation with human suffering has always struck me as needlessly pretentious and grim. Therefore, I can’t find a whole lot to praise beyond certain aspects of acting and technical execution, but it’s clear many other viewers experience Don’t Look Now differently.

          Anyway, the quasi-Hitchockian storyline begins in England, where John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) live with their young daughter. During an eerie, fragmented opening scene, the daughter drowns on the Baxters’ estate. After the tragedy, John and Laura relocate to Venice, where John has work, as a means of escaping their traumatic past. However, Laura remains unsettled, especially when she meets a pair of strange older women, one of whom claims to be a psychic receiving messages from Laura’s dead child. Worse, John has a series of jarring experiences suggesting he’s doomed. Eventually, it all gets very weird, with freaky imagery ranging from cataract-clouded eyes to a homicidal dwarf. Throughout the picture, Roeg deliberately jostles the audience’s sense of time and place with brash editing, creating an effect that might favorably be called dreamlike. Less favorably, the effect might be called confusing or simply annoying.

          At the center of the picture, consuming much more screen time than seems necessary, is an intense sex scene between Christie and Sutherland that’s meant to represent their characters coming back to life after a period of grief. Whatever its story purpose, however, the scene has become infamous after decades of rumors that the actors actually had intercourse during filming. (The gossip has been corroborated and denied so many times that, at this point, it’s anybody’s guess what really happened.) Considering that the sex scene should only be one color in the larger painting—if anything, the picture’s gruesome ending is a more appropriate subject for analysis—the fact that Don’t Look Now is best known for a few moments of carnality says something about its diffuse nature.

          And to those who adore this picture, I can only say that I envy you the pleasure of seeing the great film I’ve never been able to find in the thickets of Roeg’s brash artistic posturing. While I can recognize the fierce commitment of the leading actors’ performances and I can tout the craftsmanship of the picture’s cinematography and editing, I just can’t swing with Roeg’s cinematic insouciance.

Don’t Look Now: FREAKY

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

          The Man Who Fell to Earth is arguably the climax of the downbeat sci-fi cycle that began with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), because a year after The Man Who Fell to Earth was released, George Lucas’ Star Wars steered the sci-fi genre back toward lighthearted escapism. Every frame of The Man Who Fell to Earth is depressing and weird, and the film presents a brutally nihilistic statement about the depravity of mankind: Over the course of the picture, an alien filled with noble purpose gets sidetracked by the earthly pleasures of alcohol, sex, and television, eventually becoming a desiccated shell of his former self and the cause of his home planet’s likely ruination. Nicholas Roeg, the cinematographer-turned-filmmaker who spent the first decade of his directorial career exploring bizarre intersections between alienation and carnal desire, takes The Man Who Fell to Earth into some very strange places via surrealistic images and sounds. Furthermore, singer David Bowie, who was cast in the leading role at the apex of his androgynous rock-god reign, delivers a performance so detached that he really does seem like a visitor from another planet.
          Working with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, Roeg adapted this picture from a 1963 novel by Walter Tevis, best known for telling the story of fictional pool player “Fast” Eddie Felson in his novels The Hustler (1959) and The Color of Money (1984)—go figure. The story concerns one Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie), an alien who travels to Earth because his own planet is suffering a drought. With an eye toward buying materials for a spaceship that can transport water back to his world, Thomas uses his space-age knowledge to create inventions that make him super-wealthy. However, he gets distracted when he meets a small-town hotel employee named Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), and they embark on a romantic relationship. Soon, Thomas becomes mired in drinking and screwing, so he doesn’t notice that one of his underlings, Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), has discovered Thomas’ true identity. Nathan tells the government about Thomas just before Thomas tries to launch his spaceship, so government agents nab Thomas and secure him in a prison cell for experimentation and interrogation. That’s when the story gets really twisted, but the bummer events in the second half of the picture shouldn’t be spoiled.

          Aside from the inherently odd story and Bowie’s ethereal acting (the singer has acknowledged he was coked out of his mind during the whole production), what makes The Man Who Fell to Earth so peculiar is Roeg’s avoidance of conventional storytelling tools. Roeg obscures time relationships between scenes, so we experience the movie in as much of a blur as the characters; additionally, Roeg leaves several major story points unexplained. In fact, the very texture of the picture adds to this disorienting effect. Roeg uses heavy filters and other forms of visual distortion to heighten the strangeness of scenes, and jumpy editing creates an odd rhythm in which, say, a straightforward dialogue exchange might be juxtaposed with a phantasmagoric montage. Roeg also fills the screen with nudity and raw sex scenes, frequently jolting viewers into did-I-just-see-that reactions. Whether all of this gimmickry accentuates the story’s themes—or whether it’s all just impossibly pretentious—is a call for each individual viewer to make. What’s not open to debate is that The Man Who Fell to Earth is unlike any other sci-fi picture of the same era.

The Man Who Fell to Earth: FREAKY

Walkabout (1971)

          Iconoclastic British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg defined his cinematic identity with Walkabout, the first feature he directed alone. Previously, he earned notoriety as the cinematographer of stylish films including Petulia (1968), and he tested the directorial waters by co-helming the bizarre crime flick Performance (1970) with Donald Cammell. Yet Roeg’s distinct style of brainiac surrealism didn’t fully emerge until Walkabout, which presents an ostensibly simple story in such a complex fashion that it acquires myriad layers of meaning.

          The story involves two young children, a preadolescent boy and his teenaged sister, becoming stranded in the Australian outback. As they try to make their way toward civilization, they encounter a young Aborigine man on “walkabout,” the coming-of-age ritual in which he must wander the wilderness, and the trio forms a surrogate family until their inevitable separation. Within this straightforward framework, Roeg addresses burgeoning sexuality, cultural misunderstanding, the savagery of the natural world, and other provocative themes.

          Shooting with a documentarian’s eye for miniscule details like insects skittering across granules of sand, Roeg studies his characters and their environment meticulously; it’s as if he’s observing unexpected chemical reactions instead of interpersonal dynamics. The unusual nature of the film is evident right from the first important scene, when the children’s father drives his kids into the wilderness, opens fire on them with a gun, douses his body and car in gasoline, starts a fire, and shoots himself. In Roeg’s bleak cinematic universe, capricious fate is an everyday danger, so whenever his characters start to feel comfortable in their lives, a shock is never far behind.

          Working from a persausive script by Edward Bond, which was based on a novel by James Vance Marshall, Roeg shows equal interest in everything from the intuitive wanderings of the young boy’s nonstop chattering to the quiet naturalism of the Aborigine’s hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. The picture even cuts away periodically to snippets of native and foreign culture in Australia, glimpsing places tangentially related to the main characters.

          This is all very heady stuff for an outdoor-survival story, and yet the picture also makes room for the artsy leering that permeates so much of Roeg’s filmography. Roeg, who also photographed the movie, regularly lingers on leading lady Jenny Agutter’s body, particularly during a long nude swim, and this visual preoccupation is noteworthy given how intensely sexual Roeg’s subsequent pictures became.

          Although quite restrained by comparison to those subsequent pictures, Walkabout is nonetheless a strange film by comparison to, say, the average Hollywood release—the impressionistic editing moves the film along with offbeat rhythms, and the script refuses to employ simple paradigms like lampooning white culture’s foibles or venerating native culture’s virtues. As challenging as it is weirdly beautiful, Walkabout disallows easy interpretations.

Walkabout: GROOVY