The Vault #74: Bad Timing

The full title is Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, which promises nudity if nothing else. Rather than a lens smeared with vaseline, the lighting is stark. The credits roll over scenes from an art museum; two lovers gaze at different times at the same wall, only with a different painting hanging before them. Tom Waits croons gravelly on the soundtrack, as diagonal beams of light penetrate the space, suggesting knives to the brain of hungover socialite. Though the "timing" will become something of a debate as the plot unfolds, the "bad" elements of this scenario are made clear from the beginning. There is regret, a disconnection between two people in the same room but not together, reflected in the expressions in those Bohemian portraits - this world is out of sync.

Moments later, but months or years in terms of the narrative, we see a speeding ambulance, the man and woman now together inside. Psychoanalyst Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) identifies himself as "just a friend" of the assymetrically named Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell), but being her last call before an apparent suicide attempt suggests something more. As the ambulance blows through stop lights and around hair pin turns, and Milena's floundering body is transported to an operating table, flashes come from earlier. They meet - they have sex - they take a trip to Morocco - she upsets his work life - he upsets her psychological well being. Each event happens in isolation from the rest of the chronology; no matter where you start, this relationship was doomed from the start.

Roeg referred to his style, which often features bony, lonely, middle-aged men wandering European streets at night, as "Antonioni with humor". A doomed love affair between two ex-pats hiding out in Freud's Vienna certainly carries the Italian's trademark theme of alienation; but the casting of a middle-aged Garfunkel as the lead defangs the gravity of the inquiry. Perhaps Roeg could not find an actor with the appropriately semitic angles in his face, the right amount of neuroses in his line readings, to serve as a postmodern echo of Sigmund Freud, whose picture is often found in the corner of the frame. Perhaps Dustin Hoffman passed on the project. Roeg doesn't want us wholeheartedly consumed with the apparent tragedy on screen - he gives us plenty of time to groove to Waits and The Who, whilst Garfunkel struts in his bell-bottomed pants.

Equally important as Linden, the ostensible protagonist, is Netusil, the investigating officer played by Harvey Keitel, whose nebulous identity and country of origin lend the story a drop of Cold War intrigue. This is compounded in a scene where Linden reports to the American embassy and receives his next "assignment", to create psychological profiles of a couple of persons of interest, one of whom is Milena. Is the mild-mannered academic about to be drawn into a web of international espionage? This eyebrow-raising development gives way to Garfunkel peppering the demure Russell with questions about her not-entirely-desolved marriage to an older Czech gentleman. When the hard nosed Netusil with his mane of flowing black hair suggest that he and the feminine, graceful Linden "are quite alike", is this meant as a joke? A reference to both being politcal operatives for their countries? Shared sexual proclivities? Whatever the answer, it is a beguiling statement to the audience, who might guess all or none of the above.

The couple takes a trip to Morocco, where they are the subject of suspicious gazes. Then they go months without seeing each other. or Or is the long break before the North African vacation? Some time later she makes the fateful call, and he shows up at either 10:30 or 2 am, depending on whose clock you trust. Bad Timing is a cubist painting, each perspective line pointing to a different horizon. However, its ideological slant is not that of Rashomon, where four coherent accounts all add up to a different account. The film never attempts at a reconciliation between cause and effect, action and result, chronology and narrative. Enough films have shown the rise and fall of a tumultuous sexual relationship in this fashion. Bad Timing puts us in the moment rather than after it, with very little space to understand.

Contagion

A few days into the outbreak that will become a global pandemic in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, a high-ranking Homeland Security official hypothesizes the novel virus may be a weaponized strain of the bird flu. CDC chief Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) dismisses this possibility with the chilling observation: "the birds are already weaponizing it." This unsettling comment, applicable to reality, resonates for the rest of the film. Contagion is hardly a work of science fiction - it's catalysts and contingencies are right around the corner. This is not the world of 28 Days Later... or Outbreak - it is our own, from the civil servants to the stay-at-home dads.

This lack of fantasy only lends to the immediacy of the terror. Suppose an businesswoman (Gwyneth Paltrow) contracted a virus while on a trip to China, did not show symptoms for 24 or 48 hours, then returned home to Minneapolis, where she and her young son would be dead within the week? The next step in the drama would take place in Atlanta, at the Center for Disease Control, where Dr. Cheever would receive a briefing. The World Health Organization would hold a similar meeting in Geneva (europe represented once again by the ravishing Marion Cotillard) - the two offices might communicate by teleconference. Supposing this woman had brushed up against a Japanese man on vacation, and supposing he had met his seizing end on public transportation, a video might hit the dark corners of the internet, and a mealymouthed blogger in San Francisco might decide to shout conspiracy from the rooftops.

Soderbergh's greatest merit in his career has been his versatility, zig-zagging from ironic comedies (Ocean's 11-13, The Informant!, Schizopolis) and earnest dramas (Che, Erin Brockovich) to offbeat navel-gazing (Full Frontal, sex lies and videotape) and shallow (though worthwhile) excercises in style (Solaris, The Good German, Out of Sight). His aptitude with a variety of genres serves him well in Contagion; its various storylines form one film much more convincingly than, say, the intersecting lines in Traffic. Everyone has the best intentions. Everyone is trying their best to hold society together. And everyone is scared shitless.

One may be expecting the annihilation of the human race to be the ultimate endpoint of this film, but anything so melodramatic would distract from the larger point, which is that misinformation can move significantly faster than any airborne toxin. The wild card in Contagion is Alan Krumwiede, the conspiracy theorist with a megaphone to the ear of cyberspace played by Jude Law. Ten years ago, Krumwiede would have been linking to the patchy video of explosives going off at the base of the Pentagon - now he dishes dirt on Cheever and other officials at the time when the government most desperately needs to be trusted. It is the rare Hollywood film that makes the higher-ups of the military-industrial complex sympathetic figures, but Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns realize the terrifying truth; in the event of global infection, these are the only people we can trust. Wikileaks is good fun, but when it comes to life and death, we have to trust the people with the highest security clearance.

It is a pleasant surprise to see forgotten talents like Law and Fishburne doing quality work in a major motion picture again. This may be more on Soderbergh's account, however, than their individual efforts. Contagion keeps the stock scenes of stadiums filled with hospital beds and perfectly reasonable people rioting and a drugstore to the bare minimum. Instead, the story is strung together through refreshingly small-scale scenes. Matt Damon will be on Oscar shortlists as Paltrow's widower - Cotillard goes through an entire film's worth of emotions in 3 scenes set in a small Chinese village. Though fast-paced and detail driven like David Fincher's recent films Zodiac and The Social Network, there's a lot more humanity to go around in Contagion. It helps when hypothetical millions are dying off to realize the value of each one.  

Even with this rosy view of human nature, normalcy can never be restored fully to a world so overpopulated and interconnected. Contagion takes extraordinary events and forces us to examine the limits of our existing infrastructure and understanding - many of the ills of society revealed by the crisis are already problems in our everyday lives. It's overblown tag-line "don't talk to anyone, don't touch anyone," emphasizes the impossibility of avoiding the calamity. The higher civilization climbs, the closer we are bound to one another physically and electronically, the more crippling such an epidemic becomes, and the more likely we are to be eventually crippled by it.