FORMAT: DVD
Nicolas Roeg directed this odd and bewildering melodrama. Art Garfunkel stars as an uptight professor who is banging the free-spirited Theresa Russell. When she overdoses, he takes her to the hospital where he is questioned by cop Harvey Keitel. Through flashbacks we learn she was married (to Denholm Elliott) and that she and Garfunkel had some serious ups and downs in their relationship.
Roeg’s artsy-fartsy style works for movies like Performance and Don’t Look Now, but it’s a little cumbersome for a film that’s essentially a relationship drama. Cutting back and forth between the present and the past seemingly at random is one thing when you’re filming a police interrogation scene. It’s another thing entirely to intercut scenes of a couple having sex with graphic footage of a tracheotomy.
The sad thing is Russell (who later went on to marry Roeg) is excellent. It’s just that the flimsy script leaves her at sea. You know in movies about the making of a movie, how the dialogue often sounds melodramatic and contrived in the film-within-a-film scene? That’s how most of the dialogue in Bad Timing sounds. Like something out of a movie within a movie.
While Russell is fantastic (and has a couple of nude scenes), Garfunkel is anything but. The movie might’ve survived had Russell been paired alongside a talent that was her match every step of the way, but the casting of Garfunkel is befuddling at best and a bit painful at worst. I mean, there were so many other qualified actors you could’ve brought in who could’ve done a better job than Garfunkel. Heck, there’s a bunch of better musicians who could’ve given a better performance. For Christ’s sake, Paul Simon would’ve been a better choice than Art Garfunkel. And the less said about his nude scenes, the better. Keitel gets by from being Harvey Keitel, but his Sherlock Holmes schtick late in the game becomes tiresome.
AKA: Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession.
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