A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches down to kiss her; she closes her eyes, waiting for his lips. The Kiss: an allegory of love, reproduced from poster to pencil case into a banality that can’t completely strip the painting of its beauty. And yet, look closer. The woman’s face is turned, the man’s hands grip tightly — is she trying to prise them from her neck? The longer you stare, the less certain you become. Is she even conscious?
As the opening credits roll for Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, a man and a woman wander Vienna’s Upper Belvedere, first past Klimt’s gold-drenched fantasies and then the raw contortions of a Schiele. A wailing siren crescendos. Cut to: the same woman lies in an ambulance, gasping for air. The same man hovers beside her, silent, nervous, adjusting her exposed blouse under a paramedic’s gaze. Cut: a different time, a different place. The same woman again, at the Austrian-Czechoslovakian border, removing her wedding ring as she bids silent farewell to another man. This is how we will experience the film, as fragments of time. The whole picture will come to us slowly.
We’re flung back and forth — sometimes within the space of a scene — between moments in the lives of Alex (Art Garfunkel) and Milena (Theresa Russell). He’s a psychoanalyst living alone, seemingly respected and popular but never looking comfortable inside his own clothes. She’s a fellow American, 22, separated from her Czech husband Stefan (Denholm Elliott) and seeking something freer than what marriage offered. Their early romance glimmers with possibility. We hear Milena articulate desire for something unconstrained, non-possessive. Alex nods, agrees, is seduced — not by her freedom, but by the challenge of containing it. It becomes clear that Alex’s obsession with Milena will grow in direct proportion to her refusal to be held down. At first, this manifests in the ugly grammar of conventional jealousy: sullen stares across crowded bars, wounded silence when she refuses his bed. But when Alex is literally recruited to investigate Milena and Stefan, presumably themselves suspected of espionage, we understand Alex’s mounting paranoia has infected the logic of the film itself.
Russell never plays Milena as a victim-in-waiting. Instead, she shows us a woman caught in the tension between her desire for freedom and her attachment to the very person who threatens it. Milena’s escalating alcoholism reads less as self-destruction and more as desperate preservation of movement, an attempt to stay fluid when everything around her hardens into surveillance. The spontaneity that first attracted Alex — her refusal of captivity — becomes precisely what he must methodically annihilate. Russell makes us feel the devastation by first making us witnesses to Milena’s luminous vitality. By the time the film reaches its horrific climax and she lies unconscious — rendered object, finally controllable — the vacuum where her life-force should be becomes unbearable.
Enter Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel), the detective assigned to the case, though it might be more accurate to say he’s simply spawned into existence from Alex’s guilt. The tension between the two belies the fact that they are doppelgängers of sorts; detective and psychoanalyst alike make it their business to solve a case, and for both men solving Milena becomes an obsession. Netusil reconstructs the crime scene with an attention that blurs into voyeurism. Is he pursuing justice or vicariously consuming the violation — good cop or just another misogynist? The ambiguity is deliberate and unsettling.
It’s a cliché to point out that 20th century Vienna was a city balanced between the beauty of its facades and the rot in its foundations. The city offers two emissaries of desire: Klimt with his gilded sanctification of pleasure, and Schiele with his contorted, emaciated forms — desire gone pathological, bodies twisted toward death rather than ecstasy. One could map the couple’s trajectory as a linear progression from Klimt to his student Schiele: what begins in gold must end in decay. The idealized beauty of Milena will become a Schiele nude, pinned and dissected. But Roeg’s juxtaposition suggests something more disturbing — that Schiele was always latent, barely suppressed, within Klimt’s frozen beauty; that beneath the ornament lies the skeletal truth: obsession, possession’s inevitable violence.
When Alex and Milena first visit the gallery together, they contemplate The Kiss. Milena suggests the couple depicted are happy. “That’s because they don’t know each other well enough yet,” Alex retorts. “Oh come on, you don’t really believe that, do you?” she challenges. The exchange encapsulates their whole doomed relationship: her capacity for joy, his fundamental cynicism about intimacy. The film will ultimately confirm Alex’s pessimism, but not in the way he imagines — it’s not that lasting intimacy is innately impossible, but that his need to possess makes it so. Alex pauses as he passes Schiele’s Death and the Maiden. A man leans down to cradle a woman desperately clinging to him — a withered parody of Klimt’s embrace, not horrific so much as pathetic in its desperation. “Definitely happy,” mutters Alex, distracted. “Least I hope so.”
Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon.
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