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It wasn't her first significant film role, but 22 year-old Theresa Russell was effectively discovered in Bad Timing. It captured her precocious, world-weary sensuality, not unlike To Have and Have Not did with Lauren Bacall. As Milena, a US army brat living in Vienna, Russell's voice is deep from smoke-filled encounters with older men; she is teasingly relaxed in foreign settings and bad company, and her eyes betray an erotic mischief that is far outside her (and everyone else's) control. This certainly affects Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel), an American lecturer who becomes obsessed with her during a brief affair. The fling turns ugly and Linden begins to fixate on her 'promiscuous' past; it eats away at him like a cancer. Soon, he is trying to destroy her with the academic coldness he reserves for his professional exterior.
This is just a surface reading of Bad Timing, but it's a way into its maze of dark emotions and brutal sexual politics. It is a disturbing and characteristically confounding experience – and Nic Roeg's last great work for the cinema.

 

Julian Upton on 16th April 2007
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