Bad Timing (1980) - Nicolas Roeg
Related: 1980 - Nicolas Roeg - film
Themes: eroticism in mainstream films - war of the sexes
Bad Timing (1980) - Nicolas Roeg
"Interestingly, Bad Timing (1980) could be considered the first sexual warfare film to explore the concept of two people literally exhausting themselves to death (or at least coming perilously close); while Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and its like depicted relationships as a battle, Roeg's film creates a new terrain in which love is a consuming, destructive, time-swallowing force when the partners are essentially incompatible. One need only look at the following year's more overtly horrific Possession (1981) to see the difference (that film also uses the split of Communist and Western urban culture as an emotional mirror), or such later studies in sexual/emotional exhaustion as Bitter Moon (1992) and Crash (1996), where empty thrills must consume a couple when their hearts have long since stopped beating. " --Nathaniel Thompson http://www.mondo-digital.com/badtiming.html [May 2004]
Description
Bad Timing is a 1980 film directed by Nicolas Roeg.
In Vienna, a young American woman in her twenties (Russell) is rushed to the emergency room after apparently overdosing. With her is an Alex Linden, a American psychiatrist (Garfunkel) teaching in Vienna. Through a series of fragment flashbacks the film tells the story of their romance which ends up becoming a sexual obsession. The woman, Milena, suffers from depression and is still married to a much older man (Elliot) whom she crosses the border to see at times. Linden at first likes her free spirited ways then grows tired of her lifestyle which includes relationships with other men and heavy drinking. He spies on the woman and eventually tries to control her. At the hospital, an investigator realizes that there may be more to the case than a simple suicide. He investigates and tries to get Linden to confess to possible crimes involved with the case. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Timing [Aug 2006]
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