You?ll still be in the circus when I?m laughing in my grave (Performance (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Performance (DVD)
Date:	18/05/04 (142 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: This is the stuff! A, daft but oddly meaningful, arty Sixties film

Disadvantages: Might be a bit too, full of nudity and drugs, for some people?s tastes

Aah, Performance. A crazy, crazy movie made in 1969 by directors Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg, it fuses hardcore London gangsterism with effete London counterculture weirdness to great effect. Starring James Fox, Mick-Jagger-when-he-was-still-cool and serial Stones-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, it?s a seriously deranged art-house cult classic. It?s currently on re-release, and if you?re lucky enough to have a cinema nearby that?s showing it I?d heartily recommend that you go along.

The story is pretty simple. Chas (Fox), a violent enforcer for mob boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), kills someone he shouldn?t and has to flee his irate boss. He holes up in the dilapidated mansion of washed-up pop star Turner (Jagger) and his two girlfriends (Pallenberg and Michele Breton). Then things go peculiar for about an hour as the hippies play sinister mind games with Chas and dose him full of drugs, twisting identities and genders and all that typical Sixties stuff.

It seems to be the case that the myths that have grown up around the film have become more famous than the film itself. James Fox is supposed to have become so enthusiastic while researching his role that he actually went out and committed violent crimes. Out-takes from a sex scene between Jagger and Pallenberg allegedly won a prize at a pornography festival. Everyone was off their faces on drugs while filming (actually, that last one is probably true). Stuff like that.

Whatever did happen, the film itself was obviously cursed. Warners, its backer, refused to distribute it (it is claimed that they were expecting a light-hearted romp along the lines of the Beatles films), and when it did finally get released in 1971 it was heavily cut. (No directors? cut exists, sadly.) Nic Roeg is the only per
son involved who did well out of it, going on to direct a string of seminal arty movies in the Seventies (Walkabout, Don?t Look Now etc). Cammell only managed to complete three more films, none of which are particularly interesting, before he committed suicide in 1996. James Fox went off and became a Christian missionary for years (another Performance myth is that he went crazy because of the film), although he has re-appeared in recent years. (He was last seen buggering Lovejoy in Sexy Beast.) Pallenberg had a decade of heroin addiction ahead of her, and Jagger had a long artistic decline to look forward to.

But even though it?s not complete as the directors intended it, Performance is still an astounding film. The first half, in which we follow Chas around London as he goes about his shady business, is extremely well done. The threat of violence bubbling under the surface is genuinely uneasy, and the jovial gay crimelord Flowers is brilliantly portrayed. All the decent British crime movies that followed have been influenced by Performance to some extent, especially Get Carter and The Long Good Friday (especially the end).

The film completely changes tone in the second half as Chas gets sucked into the bizarre world of drugged out sensualist Turner. A lot of people will probably lose interest at this point, as the pretentiousness quotient gets uncomfortably high. (Although there?s plenty of nudity to keep you going through the skewed counterculture rhetoric and quotes from Borges.) Personally I love it; definitely pretentious in a good way. And the Sixties decor is fabulous. Basically Jagger, Pallenberg and Breton go around talking complete nonsense and vaguely flirting with Chas. You know how it is when someone?s on drugs and they keep coming out with tota
l nonsense that sounds really profound to them but actually means nothing? Yeah, well that?s what the second half of Performance is like - the sort of dialogue that?s parodied so well in Withnail & I (Withnail is the Anti-Performance). Don?t let that put you off, unless you find things like that really irritating. There?s a fine line between clever and stupid, and this film walks that line to perfection. (Not all the dialogue is bad: James Fox has possibly the most prescient line in cinema history when he tells Jagger "You're gonna look funny when you're fifty.")

James Fox is excellent as Chas, every inch the macho hardman who finds himself out of his depth. He?s the only professional actor in the later scenes, and boy does it show. Jagger et al are basically just being themselves - there?s no artfulness to their ?acting?, but somehow that makes it all the better. (Jagger has claimed that he based Turner on Brian Jones, but I don?t think he?s fooling anyone.) Pallenberg is very sexy and exotic, Breton is also pretty sexy in a boyish kind of way, and Jagger is Jagger. He was still kind of threatening in those days, at the height of his sneery, pouting powers, and even though he obviously can?t act for toffee he still makes quite an impact.

The direction?s a bit hard to judge, since there were two directors. Since Nic Roeg went on to enjoy enormous acclaim later, it used to be assumed that the film was largely his, and that Cammell just supplied the story. But more recently Cammell?s acquired quite a cult following. He has impeccable credentials: his dad knew Aleister Crowley, he appears in Kenneth Anger?s Lucifer Rising, he loved having threesomes with agreeable young ladies? Basically, he lived the dream, at least until he shot himself. He was also fam
iliar with the upper-class gay circles who were drawn to Ronnie Kray and his rough-trade East End boys (David Litvinoff, who was Kray?s contact in the upper crust, is credited as dialogue consultant in the film). So recently the critical pendulum has swung back in Cammell?s favour. Roeg was a cinematographer who only started directing with Performance (he shot Corman?s brilliant Masque of the Red Death). The prevailing opinion now seems to have him as the technician who was merely there to put Cammell?s extraordinary vision onto the screen, probably slightly ill-at-ease among the crazy young bohemians he was working with. I think the truth is that both men had equal influence over the project. There are enough similarities to later work by Roeg to make it obvious that he had a lot to do with it, while Cammell?s influence (drugs, gangsters, threesomes) is equally obvious.

It?s a very impersonal, distant kind of a film. In spite of the intimacy of what we see, we?re never really drawn in. A lot of people have found that coldness off-putting, even disturbing, but I find it to be an essential part of its appeal. The editing is very peculiar in places, with rapid jumping about in time (something that Roeg used a lot later on, even though apparently he wasn?t involved in the final edit for Performance). This, of course, adds to the generally impersonal, slightly inscrutable nature of the film. The incidental music is a funny old mix of things, too. Most of it consists of rather experimental sounding discordant instrumental stuff, including electronic bleeping that made me think someone in the cinema had forgotten to turn their mobile off. There are also occasional bursts of guitar-driven rock. Jagger gets one fantastic song, Memo From Turner, which epitomises all that was great about his music in the Sixties - not to
o American, not too British, nicely sinister lyrics delivered with sarcastic relish. And it has great slide guitar by Ry Cooder, who was a zillion times better at that sort of thing than Brian Jones. (You see, it?s all about ?performance?, right? The song is the only time in the film that Jagger/Turner ?performs?, while Fox/Chas is ?performing? all the time. It?s *that* kind of film, the kind that is obviously designed for French intellectuals to sit and discuss in coffee shops. No bad thing, in my opinion, and if you disagree you can just sit back and enjoy the sex scenes.)

There?s no way to adequately describe Performance - you just have to see it. It brilliantly marries the two iconic sides of Sixties London - brutal East End gangland and decadent Notting Hill counterculture, while commenting nicely on the latter?s fascination with the former. To me it?s as important piece of British Sixties culture as Sergeant Pepper or whatever. Seeing it for the first time, I definitely felt an important piece of life?s mysterious jigsaw puzzle had been slotted into place. But then I was probably stoned at the time. It?s certainly extremely self-indulgent, but watching other people be self-indulgent has never been so much fun.

Hopefully the re-release means we?ll get a nice DVD edition soon. Rated 18 for sex, nudity and drug abuse.

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