Sensual Obsession

BAD TIMING (1980)
ARENA: NICOLAS ROEG - IT'S ABOUT TIME... (2015)

Never confuse BAD TIMING as a date movie; Nicolas Roeg's extraordinary picture showcases a love affair long after the hearts stop beating, a piece that rivals Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION as the most toxic and intense break-up film of all time.

NICOLAS Roeg's motion pictures are time machines that test the cinematic medium as much as their character's journeys. Like Ken Russell, Roeg is a genre by himself, riding against the British norm of dour realism to create art-house visions for the masses. BAD TIMING is Roeg at his most vicious, where scenes of sexual perversion upset backers Rank so much ("a sick film made by sick people for sick people") they removed their gong logo and refused to screen it in their own Odeon chain. In fact, Psychiatrist Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) and Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell)'s destructive relationship was almost brought to the point of both stars walking off the film. Set in Cold War Vienna, the opening has a catatonic Milena rushed to hospital after taking an overdose, accompanied by her former lover Linden. Police Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel, in a strangely forced performance) suspects foul play and questions Linden; through flashbacks we see the events leading up to the suicide attempt, documenting Milena's experiences with Alex, her heavy drinking, and estrangement from much-older Czech husband Stefan (Denholm Elliott).

Abandoning any chronology or clarity, scenes take cues from objects, music and art, with the controversial sex scenes un-erotic and un-sexy. BAD TIMING is impossible to classify; is it a love story, psychological thriller, or even a horror movie? If it is a detective mystery it certainly isn't a good one, as Netusil is no Sherlock Holmes (promotion dubbed the film "a terrifying love story" and carried the subtitle A SENSUAL OBSESSION in American theatres). Linden's methodical mind control clashes with the free-spirited and impulsive Flaherty through jealousy, bitterness, disenchantment and permanent lack of commitment. Russell shines in her first lead role, and Garfunkel is believable as his misinformation and misconceptions unravel; what is most extraordinary is how two mainstream actors could elude to the final revelation (erroneously dubbed necrophilia by many sources) and that Roeg and Russell fell in love during the production and married soon after.

86-year-old Nicolas Roeg, photographed in his study, to promote David Thompson's  entrancing ARENA documentary.

As Nathaniel Thompson notes in Video Watchdog (#103, January 2004), "[BAD TIMING] could be considered the first sexual warfare film to explore the concept of two people literally exhausting themselves to death (or at least coming perilously close)." Roeg's film would make an unbearable double bill with Andrej Zulawski's POSSESSION - released a year later - where the Polish director draws heavily on the breakdown of his marriage to create a work lead actress Isabelle Adjani described as "emotional pornography." POSSESSION is a discordant piece that is filled with excesses borne out of sheer desperation, as it veers towards its phallus-headed amphibian monster. A less bludgeoning companion piece would be Jean-Luc Godard's PIERROT LE FOU, where its hero must balance his pursuit of aesthetic perfection and yearning for stability against the shallow desires of his lover.

ARENA's heralded first in-depth documentary on Roeg's career ultimately leaves much of the meat to a series of talking heads, while Roeg himself acts as a puppet master, often with a whimsical grin while reading poetry ("There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye" from Auden's At Last the Secret is Out). Taking its title from his obsession with scrambling and reassembling frames, NICOLAS ROEG - IT'S ABOUT TIME... is an array of entertaining and insightful comments, from Danny Boyle's wonderment of Roeg's treatment of sex in his films, to Ben Wheatley's point of how his casting of music stars (Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Art Garfunkel) somehow provide tendrils within the movies that reach out and co-exist with the moving image. Theresa Russell champions the use of dislocation in BAD TIMING as particularly apt when considering relationships ("people do not think linearly") and Roeg is quite pleased that his birth year was 1928, when sight and sound were first merged.

Blighted Blighty

CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

28 WEEKS LATER (2007)

The Americans make London their 51st state, and prove
as dangerous a threat as the ‘infected,’ in 28 WEEKS LATER.

IRONICALLY, Danny Boyle’s 28 DAYS LATER – an energetic blend of THREADS and George A. Romero’s THE CRAZIES – actually lead the so-called zombie renaissance even though it’s monsters were living, shrieking, blood-vomiting ‘infected.’ It can be argued that Boyle’s masterwork spawned the wave of undead viscera that shows no sign of abating. From the social breakdown of Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, to the political quagmire of Joe Dante’s MASTERS OF HORROR: HOMECOMING, the standard zombie diet has consisted of two delicacies: human meat – preferably intestines – and subtext; you are what you eat, and if you happen to eat people, there is anthropological gristle to chew.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 WEEKS LATER has an American-led NATO force resettling British civilians on an Isle of Dogs safe haven – a metaphor for Baghdad’s Green Zone - after the ‘infected’ from the first film have starved to death. This War on Terror, like its real counterpart, is similarly self-destructive in its bullying authority figures, demoralised combat divisions and fractured family units, a stillborn Iraqesque commentary that sees the Americans smugly declare the war against infection over. But when the situation quickly reaches Code Red they fittingly shoot at will, firebombing city blocks and releasing biological weapons. Here, fear of the ‘infected’ is a horror clearly working closely to the terror of protocol.

This UK preview poster for Fresnadillo’s sequel to 28 DAYS LATER draws heavily from the symbolism of the vastly superior virus movie THE CRAZIES.

28 WEEKS LATER lazily rehashes the first film’s ideas; the only addition to the virus Rage’s cannon is the hint that the ‘infected’ may be undergoing a kind of memory-recall that Romero’s zombies have long since taken for granted. London suggests a decimation of civilisation in general and heroes are hard to find; the two most sympathetic people, Don (a wizened Robert Carlyle) and his naturally immune wife Alice (Catherine McCormack), set the new outbreak in motion in a world of relenting doom. In fact, the film rolls in like a poisonous dust cloud of nihilism. Fresnadillo presents 28 DAYS LATER’s trademark shutter-strobe jump cuts even more frenetically than the original, adding only to the confusion. The director makes the fatal mistake of believing that chaos equals fear, and while he may have been trying to purposely disorient his audience, in reality, all he does is frustrate, equating the whole premise to that of a Rage victim: quick, loud and with little control.

Alfronso Cuaron’s CHILDREN OF MEN is a BLADE RUNNER for the 21st century, telling of a dystopian future where mass infertility has led to a world without children. Unlike Stanley Kramer’s comparable ON THE BEACH – where Australians await killer radiation with good-humoured stoicism – here the Londoners of 2027 respond to the apocalyptic sterility with a howl of self pity, which is embodied in a quasi-fascist democracy of riot shields, caged refugees and feral gangs ("The world has collapsed, only Britain soldiers on.") Beautifully filmed in battle-scarred colour drained hues, the film climaxes in a Hadean vision of Bexhill-on-Sea which most closely resembles war torn Bosnia. In this existence of rubble, Cuaron comments on the problems society faces today: racism, terrorism, government-inspired paranoia and decaying infrastructures.

Theo (Clive Owen) and Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) hold the future of humanity literally in their hands in CHILDREN OF MEN. This scene has warring factions stunned into immobility by the sight of a baby.

Non-British filmmakers, who observe the strangeness of this land with the empathy of an outsider’s eye, direct both of these releases; they also add to the grand tradition of British horrors that turn familiar sights into killing fields. Romero’s American Living Dead movies, a quartet of films spanning four decades, saw its zombies become powerful metaphors for racism, consumerism, vivisection and class. Yet there is something particular about phantasms that are placed within familiar British sites, a juxtaposition that has long been exploited by purveyors of the uncanny. Ever since Bram Stoker brought Dracula across the waters from Transylvania to Whitby, and H.G.Wells deposited his extraterrestrial invasion on the outskirts of Woking, these tales seem more credible when played out against the down-to-earth, uptight backdrop of Britain. The United States can use its landmarks to startling effect – one need look no further than the climax to PLANET OF THE APES – but it doesn’t have Britain’s deep, dark ocean of history, and perhaps it is because of this abyss which makes such scenarios resonate more subconsciously.

Layer upon layer of London soil reveals burials from prehistoric and medieval times; the city is one giant grave, from plague pits by The Houses of Parliament to St Paul’s foundations built upon remains of previous eras. One particular location – the brooding labyrinth of the London Underground – has come to embody the morbid groaning of horror’s repressed psyche. DEATH LINE surely inspired John Landis when he let his AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON loose at Tottenham Court Road station. It's here that an unsuspecting passenger is stalked and savaged in a film which trades heavily on the distinction between English locations (Yorkshire pubs, West End porno theatres, Piccadilly Circus, Tower Bridge and London Zoo) and lycanthrope fantasy. More recently, V FOR VENDETTA ran into unexpected controversy when its tube-bound finale chimed too closely with the real-life horrors of the July 7th bombings. Its fitting that the multi-lined network has such appeal; after all, the reason why the tunnel curves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington is because it was impossible to excavate through skeletal catacombs.

All the Rage

28 DAYS LATER… (2002)

Unlike the loping creatures in the films of George A. Romero, the ‘infected’ of 28 DAYS LATER… are a blur. Possessing a body-snatcher like screech, they are ravenous predators, who kill for no reason but to spread disease. Their fast-moving and savage nature is similar to the zombies portrayed in Umberto Lenzi’s delirious Italian film NIGHTMARE CITY.

DIRECTED by Danny Boyle and written by novelist Alex Garland, 28 DAYS LATER… is a release of definite indie-film sensibility, a piece of punk-rock movie making that is quintessentially British, sneeringly aggressive, but hauntingly poetic. Shot on DV, this virus/post-Apocalyptic hybrid sees animal rights activists release a chimpanzee which carries an engineered plague, ‘Rage’. 28 days later, comatose motorbike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes in an abandoned London hospital and discovers the city empty but for vicious bands of ‘infected’, whose bite or blood spray spreads the disease, and a few toughened survivors. After hearing a radio broadcast professing to have the answer to the plague, Jim sets out with hardboiled pharmacist Selina (Naomie Harris), taxi driver Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his teenage daughter Hannah (Megan Burns), to travel North. Eventually finding the source of the signal, a refuge run by Major West (Christopher Eccleston) in a requisitioned country house, Jim and Selina discover that merely surviving isn’t enough.

Once outside of London the film’s palette changes, mixing the enduring features of England – a ruined abbey, a 15th century cottage, and the stately home - with scenes of claustrophobic horror traditionally associated with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Murphy’s performance is charming and oddly ethereal, outstanding in the violent finale, while Harris treads an instinctive line between tough posturing and tender protectiveness. Eccleston, heading the gun-toting shreds of devastated authority, swallows his borderline-psychotic role with ease, while Gleeson and Burns’ father/daughter relationship lends ballast. Shooting in digital video suitably captures a coldly clinical style, picking up every drop of rain and eruption of blood. The fast editing and tight framing add a raw brutality to the spasmodic violence, an adrenalised energy which creates particularly strong effects when showing the jarring, slashing movements of ‘infected’, and in the scene where Selina dispatches newly-infected Mark (Noah Huntley) with a machete.

Cillian Murphy wakes up to find London an empty
maze of wreckage and useless landmarks.

The power of the film is not that it hasn’t been done before, but that it hasn’t been done recently. Floating in 28 DAYS LATER… are lasting cultural artefacts, thoughtful re-imaginings of familiar themes and images explored in British science fiction. Waking in a deserted hospital (The Day of the Triffids), a sequence hinging on a flood of rats (James Herbert), a distrust of laboratories (DOOM WATCH), and the question of if everyone is dead what’s the point in living (THE SURVIVORS), all represent a throwback to fantasy formulae of yore. Furthermore, the depopulated London strikes a chord with an embedded psyche by everything from The War of the Worlds to DOCTOR WHO - THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH. Consequently, the film acts as a spiritual successor to these streams, but is given a tense post-millennial edge by Boyle’s stripped-down visual aesthetic.

Containing an evocative soundtrack of both peace and rock-guitar fury - a dichotomy that is fitting for a film obsessed with anger and the quest for calm - 28 DAYS LATER… also taps into millennial fears about chemical warfare and viral outbreaks. Released at the onset of the SARS panic, it is also a reflection of our increasingly stressful social interactions, employing the ‘infected’ as a metaphor for the breakdown of our behaviour towards one another. The film suggests that anger has become the defining emotional response in capitalist societies; ‘Rage’ is not an abstract monster, or based on the usual factors that cause violence such as race, religion or gender. Rather, it is a social condition that has no defining boundaries, a new kind of intolerance that is in all of us.