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Something I feel like I'm appreciating more on repeat viewings is the underlying political aspect - the Cold War paranoia getting internalised and reflected in the dysfunctional miscommunication in the relationship, yet also the mutually destructive fascination of being unable to leave each other alone. Probably the political aspect gets its most obvious workout in the lecture that Garfunkle gives to his students about how "we're all spies", and in the oblique plotline of the secret report Garfunkle has to write.

But of course all of these 'outside world' ideas (spying, art and music, politics), while constantly impinging on the edges of the frame, or filling up the characters bookshelves or bedrooms, are filtered into service of, and through the perspective of, the central relationship. The cold clinical observation (while crucially missing on picking up crucial, human needs in their partner), or blunt questioning continually gets contrasted with the fleshier, sexual, more emotional and less thought through impulses (the extravagant, in danger of being overblown gesture - in that sense Alex's line crossing act is a bizarre combination of the clinical and the emotionally impulsive, something that he can only give reign to when he is 'alone' with nobody watching). That also seems to be the idea that governs the editing pattern of the film - movement from clinical to emotional; from the body as sexual being to one being operated on; from the intellectual classroom discussions or police interrogations to the casual, languid bedroom conversations.

All leading to the nostalgia for one state whilst you are inhabiting another. Until there is too much of a gulf to be able to jump easily from one state to another any more (is it delusion to think that you could do so forever, or a delusion to try and change your nature for another?)

It leaves an unbridgable philosophical, psychological (eventually physical) gap between the characters - like a deep river with the only bridge crossing it manned by armed border guards preventing easy return!

Re-watched Bad Timing recently, and am again reminded why this is one of my favorite films. Truly sublime. IMHO the film paints a great portrait of how mis-communication & inherently different wants/expectations can lead to a truly destructive & unhealthy relationship. And, the architecture of post-war late '70's Vienna was amazing - a visual feast.

The film is also one of the best edited I've ever seen; I liked how it began near the end & played with time, showing Alex & Milena's relationship at different periods, all out of order...I think the film needs to be seen at least 2-3 times to be fully undertood - and, IMHO it's one of those films that gets better with each viewing....

The last scene was quite powerful -

Spoiler

when Alex saw Milena in NYC, and you saw the horrible scar on her throat....then she turned away as he called after her...

Can't say enough how powerful & important the rock/pop soundtrack was in the film; I especially liked the scenes with the Billie Holliday & The Who songs - the scenes these songs were played over wouldn't have been nearly as good/effective without this music...

Side-note: Denholm Elliot (Milena's husband) and William Hootkins (a colonel who spoke to Alex) were also in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a year after BT (1981)....interesting coincidence...

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This might be a good opportunity to celebrate an actor who usually only turned up in small roles during his career, but indelibly memorable ones: William Hootkins. He appears in one very small scene in Bad Timing as a Colonel showing Art Garfunkle's character around an American base in Germany, offering him a job (i.e. co-opting the intellectual) and subliminally ramping up the Cold War paranoia themes of disconnection between suspicious people that is played out in the personal story of the couple. However the roles that he is much better known for are even smaller: he was the X-Wing pilot (known unflatteringly as "Porkins") in Star Wars: A New Hope who gets blown up in the assault on the Death Star after getting too cocky; and the year after Bad Timing was one of the two government agents sending Indiana Jones after the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark (He's the one who has the "our top men are working on it" line).

Hootkins has a lot of other genre credits too: he's in Flash Gordon the same year as Bad Timing and at the end of the 80s is in Tim Burton's Batman. He's also in all three of Richard Stanley's first films: Hardware (where he plays a really repellent slavering voyeur character who gets a particularly nasty death at the hands of the killer robot), with a South African accent in Dust Devil, and is another one of the legacy cast presumably brought in by Stanley who ended up trapped in that ill fated production of The Island of Dr Moreau.

(And he has another run in with a killer robot in Stephen Norrington's Death Machine where he plays a character named "John Carpenter"!)

And here are a couple of discussion points on Bad Timing that may be useful. How much do others see the scene in the middle of the film on the staircase (the “Is this what you want? Do it, then!” goading one) as the true no going back moment of the film, turning the final notorious act from less of a shocking out of nowhere surprise and more into an inevitable coda to an already irreversibly broken relationship?

I cannot remember where I heard this idea first brought up (maybe Mark Cousins’ Moviedrome introduction), but the film made a lot more sense to me when it was highlighted that Harvey Keitel’s policeman investigating into the circumstances of Milena’s coma is a character who desperately wishes to know the details but then finds on getting their target to spill the beans that they really should have been careful what they wished for and not have asked for details so insistently! That once that connection (and complicity) has been forged and the dam has been broken holding him back, now Keitel is probably going to have Garfunkle constantly wanting to talk about every aspect of his life with him!

(That also reminds me of one of Roeg’s commentaries either on Walkabout or The Man Who Fell To Earth where he describes a couple talking, with one badgering the other: “What are you thinking?” “Nothing”, “Come on, you must have been thinking about something”, until annoyed they respond, “I’m actually thinking about a divorce now”! Pushing too hard into talking about a concern runs the risk of bringing the fears into stark reality, and what are you going to do about it at that point? At what point does the desire to know, or to provoke and test a partner, end up backfiring into stark confirmation of a situation that would have been better left ambiguous for the good of all involved?)

The complicity between the Keitel and Garfunkle characters becoming oversharing is an interesting one (note that they both have matching maze pictures on their wall as if to suggest a shared temperment), and perhaps means that they share a certain coldly clinical intellectual approach towards messy human behaviour that may ironically blinker them to how actual humans behave in relationships. It also contrasts against the main relationship getting more and more distant, much to Milena’s distress, going from in person blazing arguments to only being able to talk to each other over the telephone, until by the end while the body remains and can be interacted with in intimate detail, it is damningly completely impossible to bridge the communication divide between the couple. And so they separate, we in the audience who have so closely identified with the workings of Alex's mind ending up trapped in the departing taxi cab looking wistfully out of the back window whilst Milena coldly turns her gaze away from Alex, and damningly also the audience, to show definitively that she has closed the door and cut us all out of all but the briefest passing glimpse of her new life after this long and painful (and almost deadly) episode that we were privy to. Then the final shot is of those islands separated by a stretch of water, standing aloofly separate and isolated from each other with no glimpse of any bridge (even one with a checkpoint) spanning the divide between them, working in much the same metaphorical way that the couple in Don't Look Now in their passing boats did to stress the fundamental isolation of the human condition.

It’s a fascinating film about the split between the body and the intellect, and maybe how one ‘corrupts’ (or ‘tricks’?) the other. Or overbalances too much in either direction that it becomes impossible to see the other side of things, at least until it is too late to be able to do much about it. It also makes me want to learn more about Klimt, given the focus on that artist’s paintings during the opening credits. Is Klimt someone who struggled with that dichotomy themselves, or managed to meld the intellectual and sensual together successfully?