Alex Moss EditorWhen Warner Bros. originally commissioned Donal Cammell and Nicolas Roeg to film Performance, the rumour has it, they thought they were getting a Rolling Stones version of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. When they saw what they actually had they shelved it for two years so shocked were they by the film. Because Performance is a lot of things; a violent crime thriller, an essay on the nature of identity and artistic execution and often a drug and sex-fuelled hangout movie. It is most definitely not A Hard Day’s Night.
Chas (James Fox) is a London gangster enforcer who angers his boss by killing the wrong person. Going into hiding he stumbles upon a basement room up for rent and heads to the house in question. There he finds struggling rockstar Turner (Mick Jagger) who feels he’s lost his muse and so becomes fascinated by Chas. Despite Chas feeling outside this bohemian lifestyle he stays at the house with Turner and his girlfriends Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton) and slowly begins to become part of their lives.
As you would expect from a film co-directed by Nicola Roeg, Performance is a kaleidoscopic, head-spinning collection of montages that blends together sex, violence, romance and symbolism to tattoo itself on your retinas. Its jarring and disorientating ways juggle scenes of disturbing violence with alluring sex making it a film that wants to disturb and seduce in equal measure. The juxtaposition of macho gangster violence with bohemian expression is as fascinating as it is discombobulating.
It is a film entrenched in the era it was made. A decaying London perfectly framing a free-love, free-spirited liberation that was clinging to relevance. Everything is shot with a grime, a grainy look akin to the mushrooms spawning in the dark recesses of the basement dwelling characters.
And then Performance will drown us in colour, some of it evocatively gory, a spray of red paint preluding violence, some of it an expression of the art, the performance at the film’s core.
It is an expressionistic insight into art trying to make sense of chaos, poetry trying to make sense of life, Performance is a film that captures a sense of existential crisis, of people desperate to be something but pretending to be something else. One minute it’s in your face, literally, sweaty gangsters’ faces in such frame filling close ups it’s as if you can taste the stench coming off them. The next you’re gliding around a damp, incense smelling fortress of decadence.
One scene sees Jagger sing a scene we’ve seen previously in the film and in this moment the film transcends what it started as. It becomes a vortex into the power of storytelling, character and poetry to edit life and memory as we know it. And in that there is a power that Roeg and Cammell conjure. A film about the nature of creativity that acts as an essay to the era it was made, Performance is a beguiling and disorienting film.
Performance is Available from The Criterion Collection Now.
