Nicolas Roeg: It's About Time
9pm, BBC Four
"There's no such thing as coincidence," the 86-year-old Nic Roeg says amiably in tonight's profile of the inimitable British director, and as often happens when Roeg is involved, it gave me an uncanny feeling.
Literally the day before I learned about this new documentary, I'd found myself thinking about Roeg's richly complex, deeply disturbing 1980 movie Bad Timing, and the tragic coincidence surrounding that film about dark coincidence. In the movie, Art Garfunkel arrives at his girlfriend's apartment to find she's fatally overdosed on pills; as shooting ended, Garfunkel got the news his long-term girlfriend had fatally overdosed on pills in their apartment. He later claimed to have experienced a vision of her dying while making Roeg's film.
Such occurrences are not uncommon in Roegland. Most notorious is the way art and reality blurred on his first film as director, 1970's Performance, the mix of East End gangsters, decaying bohemia, altered states and black-sex-magick that saw James Fox's thug losing himself in a dingy mind game with Mick Jagger's rock recluse. After filming wrapped, Fox quit acting and took shelter with a fundamentalist religious sect for almost a decade.
Maybe the weirdest thing about that movie about identities merging, though, was how Roeg himself seemed to merge with his co-director, Donald Cammell. They never worked together again but, in their subsequent films, each returned repeatedly to ideas exploding in Performance: above all, the notion that all of time - every moment, past, present, future - is occurring simultaneously. (In Performance, Jagger is shot in the head; Cammell coincidentally shot himself in the head in 1996.)
Cammell, though, never quite caught it again the way Roeg did time and again: Bowie seeing pioneers by the highway in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976); Donald Sutherland half-glimpsing past and future as they coincide to rupture the chill Venice present of Don't Look Now (1973). No British director since has come close to the way that Roeg - using composition, framing, colour, sound, camera movement and, above all, soft, sharp, kaleidoscopic, coincidental editing - expresses, suggests and exposes things that dialogue, language, cannot.
It's Roeg's concern with time, or transcending it, that the director of tonight's documentary, David Thompson, nods to in his title. But you can take it several ways. For one, it's about time for this film. Although he's appeared in documentaries before, this is the first time Roeg has sat still for such a tribute. (In 1982, Channel 4 did a brilliant Roeg documentary, Nothing As It Seems, but Roeg himself appeared only briefly, saying nothing.)
For another, time works against this film. Thompson, who has made some of the best BBC cinema documentaries of the past 30 years, has gathered the stuff to make the ultimate Roeg profile. There are interviews with Roeg, his producing and writing partners, and actors including ex-wife and muse Theresa Russell and Don't Look Now's iconic couple, Sutherland and Julie Christie.
But where once Arena could mount a three-hour biography on Orson Welles, today Thompson has an hour to capture Roeg. It's not enough. He deserves an hour on Roeg's pre-directing career as cinematographer alone, working with David Lean and Francois Truffaut, obsessing on red, coincidentally filming Christie's face time and again.
Still, this is to be treasured. It scratches the surface, but - allusive, elusive - scratches deep enough to show that Roeg, who resembles a retired bank manager and makes films that make your mind shiver and split, is the most deceptive surface of all.
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