Performance 1970
The Story
Directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, and based on a script by Cammell, Performance was visually daring even by the standards of its day. It was financed by Warner Brother probably with an eye on the commercial possibilities of a film starring Mick Jagger who was then at the zenith of his rock-god status. The finished movie, however, was too controversial for the studio (Jagger doesn’t even appear until halfway through) and was initially released in a heavily cut version.
Even today the film defies easy classification. It starts as a gangster film set in contemporary London but uses Roeg’s expressionistic camera to quickly establish a louche and frenetic style that practically reinvented the genre and has been much imitated since. Chas (James Fox) is a “frightener”, a sadistic thug, working for two gangsters obviously based on the Krays. The closeted and violent world he lives in, with its unwritten rules, is brilliantly evoked in the introductory section. The story changes when Chas is forced to go on the run from his employers after he kills somebody and brings them unwanted attention.
The action then shifts to a rambling mansion in Notting Hill where Chas insinuates himself as an unlikely lodger. This is the home of a semi-retired and reclusive rock star, Turner (Mick Jagger) who lives with a seraglio of women, including Pherber (Anita Pallenberg). To Chas, this is the perfect “hidey hole” though he is openly contemptuous of Turner’s lifestyle. Pherber and Turner, however, are fascinated by Chas. Pherber is convinced that Chas can restore to Turner his “demon” – the source of his creativity – and that, in some way, Chas and Turner are two halves of the same psyche. She feeds Chas psychedelic mushrooms in a deliberate assault on his defences: “I just want to get in there, to go right inside …”
Here the film enters the territory of Timothy Leary and Carlos Castaneda and the ‘magical’ aspects of hallucinogenics, somewhere harder for a modern audience to follow. The ending of the film is deliberately ambiguous: do Chas and Turner succeed in fusing together? Certainly, the film blends gangster and psychedelic genres together in an often maddening combination of posturing and striking originality.
It is a film that is very much of its time (the interest in sexual role-playing, for example, that was about to blossom in the seventies with figures like David Bowie) and very much a cult film par excellence – but also manages to transcend both of those narrow definitions.
Scene 1
(Top of the page)
For a gangster film, Performance actually contains relatively little explicit violence, the implicit kind being demonstrably more effective. This scene shows the attack on Chas in a chaotic, cartoonish way – a series of frames that are deliberately stylised like panels by Lichtenstein, the dialogue a series of interjections
But the subtext is not simplistic, there is a backstory informing it. When Maddox (Anthony Valentine) pleads with Chas, after minutes or hours of whipping, you glimpse a complex homoerotic relationship in a couple of lines. The insets – a typical Roeg touch – makes the connection with male competition in the schoolyard and boxing ring.
The dreamlike quality of the killing at the end of the scene likewise feels absolutely convincing, Chas’s detachment contrasting with Maddox’s disbelief at his own death (Kubrick has a similar scene in Lolita where James Mason shoots Peter Sellers but Roeg uses his camera to push it even further).
Scene 2
Performance has quite an evolved mythology surrounding its filming: there are tales of shooting being done in a haze of hashish smoke; of a jealous Keith Richards haunting the set to prevent Jagger stealing his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg; and of a ‘secret’ 16mm film of explicit sexual activity under the sheets. Whatever happened off set, Performance is probably the most successful of the sixties films that attempted to celebrate psychedelia; not just because Roeg is too good a cinematographer to resort to the usual kaleidoscopic cliches, but because it focuses on the glamour that surrounded drug culture rather than trying to show the effects.
The kitchen in this scene, like the rest of the womb-like house, is a perfect microcosm of London hippy chic. Cammel summons up a stoned atmosphere through word patterns and rhythms and Roeg uses the camera to bore through the back of James Fox’s head. It’s not especially subtle but it’s persuasive – about the most persuasive ‘druggy’ scene to reach the screen until Withnail and I two decades later.
Scene 3
On the making of Performance
Read the photostory of Performance
Photostories tell the story of a film in strip-form, using stills. They were a feature of early film magazines. This one is taken from an eighties Orbis publication called The Movie.