Chapter 20 An Inorganic Interpretation of Character as Destiny: Bad Timing, 1980

An Inorganic Interpretation of Character as Destiny: Bad Timing, 1980 An Alain Resnais-like movie, the flashback method of non-linear narrative splits the film into a long string of pearl sequins. Its beauty is due to the British director Nicolas Roeg's editing of sound and picture precision and experience.In the works of this representative of British modernist films, time is always cut mercilessly by montage. In "Bad Timing" ((BadTiming)), the present and the past are disorderly combined, and the near death and sexual pleasure are also intentionally or unintentionally corresponded.Occasionally silent, but thrilling.The film consists of an affair between a psychoanalyst and a cynical woman, and finally they are involved in a black whirlpool that they cannot extricate themselves from.The ending presents a scene of suicide and near necrosis.The film has almost no plot, and according to the playwright's analysis, this is "a modern interpretation of the ancient concept of 'character is destiny'" ("Story").In this film, the environment is abstract, there is no society, no family, no chance, no God, and the conflict in the film is the irremediable and unalterable personality of man himself.A man wants to possess a woman, and this woman belongs only to him.Her request was to "know her less and love her more".She is a woman who cannot be possessed, whose fate is to migrate from city to city, drift from man to man.The theme of this melodrama is similar to that of a melodrama. Under the force of anti-structure, it presents a charming and self-indulgent light color, and at the same time exposes the "deep toxicity" of sex and love.The editing method of front and back, long and short, turns the real into an illusion, and then into the present, entangled terror and desire inorganically.