Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession

Nicolas Roeg's most powerful film is a virtuoso, sexually charged psychodrama, brimming with intense and destructive emotions and desires. A guest lecturer of psychoanalysis Alex (Art Garfunkel) meets the free-spirited Milena (Theresa Russell) in a Viennese art gallery adorned with the golden canvases of fin de siècle painter Gustav Klimt. Later, as they admire The Kiss, Milena remarks how happy the tightly entwined lovers appear. "That's because they don't know each other yet," Alex replies—unaware that he's foreshadowing the tragic course of their own relationship. Bad Timing lays bare the darker side of romantic passion: the selfishness of a love steeped in lust and pain. The mosaic style of Klimt's Art Nouveau paintings finds a visual counterpart in Roeg's kaleidoscopic narrative, which resembles a shattered mirror gradually reassembling into a coherent pattern.