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| Nicolas Roeg |
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| Roeg with Mick Jagger |
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| James Fox rehearsing a scene |
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| Mick Jagger with Anita Pallenberg |
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| Pallenberg with Donald Cammell |
PERFORMANCE B+ Great Britain (105 mi) 1970 d: Nicolas Roeg co-director: Donald Cammell
The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. —Turner (Mick Jagger)
The most confounding film of its time, part of the 60’s psychedelic movie milieu, yet defying expectations of viewers, this rarely seen, small gem of a film is crazily indulgent and equally fascinating, now viewed as a cult film, filled with drug-induced attitudes and pseudo-philosophies of the 60’s that one might expect with Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger in a starring role, the first rock star to work with Roeg before David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Art Garfunkel in BAD TIMING (1980). Roeg had previously understudied David Lean and worked exclusively as a cinematographer for François Truffaut in FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), John Schlesinger in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (1967), and Richard Lester in PETULIA (1968). Taking viewers completely by surprise are some jaw-droppingly sadistic elements that may leave many scratching their heads in disgust, as the film really uglifies any remnants of a peaceful drug experience and instead shatters all illusions with grisly violence, heavily infiltrated by a toxic crime element, perhaps mirroring the ritualization of violence in the Hell’s Angels crashing the party at Altamant, culminating in a grotesque murder in the crowd while the Rolling Stones were performing onstage, as depicted in the Maysles Brothers Gimme Shelter (1970) released that same year. Talk about a downer, this film is a glorified head case, an early proclamation announcing the end of the 60’s. Written by Scottish painter turned screenwriter Donald Cammell, who was part of the London underground scene, and filmed by Nicolas Roeg, who provides the hallucinatory effects, they are indistinguishable collaborators on this film, often blending two or three shots into a single image, continually contrasting sharply defined images with free-form flashbacks, implementing a disjointed editing style while uniquely exploring identities, seen here as the merging and loss of individualism and gender. Set in the waning days of the Swinging London era of 1968, defined by Twiggy, Carnaby Street, and the British Invasion, represented by films like John Schlesinger’s DARLING (1965), Karel Reisz’s MORGAN! (1966), or Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), this delves into a shadowy, considerably seamier side of London, where the performers are James Fox as Chas Devlin, an ultra-violent and ambitious hired East End thug who is part of the protection racket of London gangsters, using threats and extreme violence to frighten and coerce people (Marlon Brando was initially considered for the role as a brash American), perhaps a precursor to Malcolm McDowell in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) without the cocky humor, while Mick Jagger plays Turner, a fallen rock star living a life of narcissistic seclusion, with the mesmerizing, often naked or semi-clad Anita Pallenberg as Pherber (the girlfriend of Keith Richards, and former girlfriend of Brian Jones, causing extreme jealousy, leading to Richard’s refusal to perform on the soundtrack) and equally mysterious Michèle Breton (who never made another film) as Lucy playing his ménage à trois bed partners. Their paths cross and there is a struggle and transference of identity, two dissimilar men hiding under the same roof, with lots of explicit sex, drug use, and strange mind games, including a hallucinogenic experience that takes a turn for the worse, with subtle references, mysterious dialogue, and disorienting filming techniques, continually blurring the lines of reality. In this film, nothing is what it seems, evolving into a psychedelic head-trip, shot with extreme emotional detachment, shown in an elliptical, non-linear style that simply drove studio bosses up the wall. Completed in 1968, Warner Brothers, hoping to tap into the burgeoning youth market, was shocked by its frank depiction of drug use and what they described as pornographic sex, declaring the film “unreleasable,” so appalled by the results that the film sat on the shelves until 1970, unceremoniously released without a publicity tour, when it was almost universally vilified by critics, described by Richard Schickel for Time magazine as “The most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing.” With Jagger signed on to play a lead role, the biggest rock star on the planet at the time, studio heads were drooling at the thought this might resemble Richard Lester’s playful use of the Beatles in A HARD DAYS NIGHT (1964), yet they couldn’t have been pleased with John Simon’s review in The New York Times, The Most Loathsome Film of All? - The New York Times, which reads, in part, “You do not have to be a drug addict, pederast, sadomasochist or nitwit to enjoy Performance, but being one or more of those things would help.”
Film historian Colin MacCabe calls it the best British film ever made, listed at #7 in the Time Out magazine list of best British films of all time, Best British Movies | 100 Best British Films of All Time - Time Out, while in his 15-hour British documentary on the history of film, THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY (2011), Mark Cousins offers his view, “Performance was not only the greatest seventies film about identity, if any movie in the whole Story of Film should be compulsory viewing for filmmakers, maybe this is it.” The grotesquely exaggerated, in-your-face style may be off-putting to some, using extreme close-ups, intrusive jump cuts, and repetitive sound bites to undermine any connection to character, with events shown out of sequence, using Moog-like sounds with bits and pieces of discordant melodies in a unique soundtrack designed by Jack Nitzsche, creating an imbalanced and distorted view that continually keeps viewers off-kilter, a jagged style that later became associated with Roeg, plunging viewers into a world of the unknown. One might say there are two halves to this film, with the first more closely following Cammell’s script, predominately featuring the rollicking adventures of Chas, an enforcer in the protection racket run by Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), forcibly shaking business owners down, instilling fear with open threats, while a parallel story is taking place in the courts describing how business mergers are profitable legal transactions, where the weaker are joined by stronger interests, which is better for both parties, claiming “Business is business and progress is progress.” The sadistic nature of his work makes Chas a happy camper, a perfectionist right down to the smallest detail, relishing what he does for a living, a swaggering brute with a taste for rough sex and fancy clothes, specializing in extortion, allowing him to exhibit a supreme arrogance and haughty disregard of others, fast forward to Christian Bale in American Psycho (2000), which ruffles the feathers of Flowers a bit, as he has to constantly remind him who he’s working for, as he’s not in business for himself. Anyone going into this film expecting to see Mick Jagger will be extremely disappointed in the first 45-minutes, as he’s nowhere to be found, bogged down by this brutally violent depiction of the criminal underworld, where Flowers has a habit of taking over struggling businesses, using muscle to apply pressure, where mocking and humiliating intimidation are his stock and trade, with Chas an exemplary, over-the-top example of one of his lieutenants exerting mafia-style tactics. Flowers targets the small town betting operations of one of Chas’s childhood friends, Joey Maddox (Anthony Valentine), ordering Chas off the case, due to his close personal connection, but he decides to pay him a visit anyway, with Joey and his friends mocking Chas, convinced he is queer, with BDSM references littered throughout. After receiving his fair share of abuse, however, he allows his temper to get the best of him and murders Maddox in a crime of passion, causing him to run not only from the police, but from Harry Flowers. His quest for anonymity before escaping abroad and forging a new identity leads him to seek shelter in a temporary landing spot, the dilapidated basement residence of the Notting Hill home of Turner. This second half of the film is infinitely more bewildering, turning into a cinematic puzzle piece that can be mind-blowingly cryptic and enigmatic, leading him into a crumbling labyrinth of candles, ornate mirrors, velvet drapes, and a squalid Bohemian vibe that he abhors, describing it over the phone with his proper Cockney accent, “It’s a right pisshole. Longhairs, beatniks, free-love, foreigners...you name it!” The pace of the film slows considerably, with no real storyline, becoming more of an underground or experimental film, where it’s mostly the blues guitar of Ry Cooder heard in the background, with no songs from the Rolling Stones, where Jagger’s role is actually to act, though the character he resembles is largely himself. Nonetheless, he offers acute observations on this intruder that become the focal point near the end, with the two women swirling around him like sharks playing sexual mind games, questioning him on his motives, just who he is, and why he wants to be there, where their alluring beauty and frank sexuality is striking, while Jagger’s hovering presence oversees everything, like an omniscient force, but remains mystifying, creating a daring pathway into an inner sanctum of unexplored psychedelia.
While the 60’s American counterculture was largely influenced by the postwar Beat Generation, British Bohemian culture drew from older and wider literary influences. Interspersed into the film are two Jorge Luis Borges readings, the Argentine short-story writer, essayist, and poet, and staunch critic of authoritarian rule, where his spirit hovers over the entire production, and his image emerges at a precipitous moment near the conclusion of the film. Both Chas and Turner are shown reading Personal Anthology, the collection of stories published around the time it was filmed, while Turner mentions Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius during his initial encounter with Chas before reciting some material from it, and later reads a passage from The South out loud, “They would not have allowed such things to happen to me in the sanitarium, he thought” The South Lyrics | Beelyrics.net. Adding to the myth surrounding this film, Donald Cammell put a gun to his head and shot himself years later in 1996, asking his wife to bring a mirror so he could watch himself die, where his last words reportedly were, “Can you see the picture of Borges?” Mirrors help create the maze-like illusion in Jagger’s lair, where the layout is deliberately obscure, and the number of rooms uncertain, while Chas and Turner both alter their appearance as they go down the Rabbit hole, growing more curious, each recognizing an alter-ego in the other until eventually you can’t tell them apart, becoming spiritually fused together. The actor James Fox first gained notoriety in Joseph Losey’s THE SERVANT (1963), another identity-crisis drama about mind games and sexual role reversals, while an androgynous gender fluidity became part of Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s rock star stage personas in the late 60’s. Secretly fed psychedelic mushrooms by Pherber, a window into his soul is expressed through a shattered reality, as identities are dismantled and merged, becoming an assault on the senses with fractured visuals and a near impenetrable thematic motif, no longer able to discern reality from fantasy, challenging his macho posturing and repressed queer desires, offering nothing in the way of explanation or expository information, with a little esoterica thrown in as well, forcing viewers to find a way in, yet this is exactly what the directors had in mind. “There is no truth, everything is permitted,” Turner explains to Chas, quoting Vladimir Bartol’s 1938 novel, Alamut, (Vladimir Bartol's “Alamut”), a historical novel that tells an Old Man and the Mountain story of Hassan-i Sabbah and the Hashshashin (Assassins) in Persia, who committed murders in hopes of gaining entrance to his hashish-laced Garden of Delights, full of rare flowers, strange perfumes, and exotic young women, a recurring image in the film and an allegorical story that so fascinated Beat writer William S. Burroughs that he included the reference in his 1959 post-modern novel, Naked Lunch (A Brief Note on Hassan I Sabbah, William S. Burroughs, and ...). With Jagger riffing on an acoustic guitar, moving from a Robert Johnson blues lament, Robert Johnson - Come on in my Kitchen - YouTube (2:50), to John Lee Hooker, JOHN LEE HOOKER - BAD LIKE JESSE JAMES - YouTube (5:21), Roeg creates a visual kaleidoscope as he begins to get inside his guest’s head, his identity and aggressiveness undermined by drugs, with mirrors everywhere, as Pherber dresses him up in a wig before playing Merry Clayton’s Poor White Hound Dog, Performance (1970) -- (Movie Clip) Poor White Hound Dog YouTube (1:45). The film juxtaposes two different models of British masculinity, the over aggressive street hoodlum of Chas and Jagger’s ambisexual rock star Turner, who moans that he’s been abandoned by his “inner demon,” leading directly into the centerpiece of the film, Jagger’s sarcastically mocking version of Memo from Turner, Performance (1970) -- (Movie Clip) Memo From Turner ... YouTube (3:42), a fantasy that ultimately ties everything together. It’s a seismic shift that allows the two worlds to collide, leading to a finale where he’s driven off in a white Rolls Royce loaned by John Lennon, with the film remaining ambiguous to the core. The peculiar strangeness of the Harry Flowers gang was a radical departure from any other cinematic version of gangsters, with homoerotic implications expressed through a fantasy-like delirium. It might not surprise anyone that heroin was rampant on the set of the film, along with a cornucopia of drugs, while promiscuous sex was commonplace, with Cammell, whose career was never the same afterwards, allegedly encouraging drug use and sexual experimentation to create the proper mood. Fox was so shaken by the role that he didn’t act again for an entire decade, instead becoming a born again Christian, while Anita Pallenberg stopped modeling and got further hooked on drugs. The two halves were filmed so separately that she was completely surprised when she saw the gangster sections in the final cut. Jagger’s girlfriend at the time was Marianne Faithfull, who remarked in her autobiography, the set was “a psychosexual laboratory…a seething cauldron of diabolical ingredients: drugs, incestuous sexual relationships, role reversals, art and life all whipped together into a bitch’s brew.” Disturbed by the bad vibes, she quickly departed for Ireland.
