The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 23-29
Bad Timing (1980)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
Unironically branded “a sick film made by sick people for sick people,” by its own distributor—the unironically named Rank Organization—Bad Timing’s shot at the good kind of scandal was undermined from the start. For decades afterwards, distribution, even on video, remained limited—an unusual, frustrating fate for such a major figure as Roeg and for a such raw, intricate film. But as with Gaspar Noé’s notorious Irreversible, with which Bad Timing shares an ambivalently cosmic outlook on time and timing, it’s hazardous (and arguably essential) to note that rape is central to the story here. Roeg’s film pushes against simplification, however, perhaps even to a fault, cool and distant where it should be hot. Told in serpentining fragments, arrhythmically edited and soundtracked by a grabbag of Tom Waits, The Who, and others, with Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell as two ragged, consuming lovers, Bad Timing is a singular, disturbing post-mortem of obsession, possession, and desire, uncompromisingly erotic, traumatized, and knotted. Jeremy Polacek (March 26, 4pm; March 27, 8:30pm at the Metrograph’s “Metrograph A-Z”)