Scottish painter Donald Cammell’s 1970 co-directorial effort
with then-cinematographer Nicolas Roeg Performance is one of the
greatest unsung psychotronic surreal horror freakouts of British cinema
featuring one of rock and roll’s signature lords of darkness with Mick Jagger
in perhaps his most striking screen time to date. A film on paper that should’ve been a
music-movie vehicle for The Rolling Stones frontman that in practice
turned out to be a poisonous provocation about the gulf between the British
gangster and the British rock star, Performance quickly joined the likes
of Michelangelo Antonioni’s equally divisive and hallucinatory provocation Zabriskie Point which also sported Pink Floyd music. What to do with this unreleasable underground
kaleidoscopic elliptical abstraction(?), wondered Warner Brothers who kept it
on the shelf for two years before dumping it in 1970 following the success of X
rated films like Midnight Cowboy.
Mired in controversy and rumors about whether or not the sex
and drug use onscreen was real (some of it turned out to be) or if the
gangsters in it were real and not professional actors or the perhaps actual
maddening toll it took on its lead actor James Fox who wouldn’t act again for
another ten years, initially Performance was reviled upon release. A forgotten footnote in Roeg’s career while
Donald Cammell only made three more features including the 1977 sci-fi horror
film Demon Seed and the 1987 horror film White of the Eye before tragically
dying of suicide in 1996. Roeg would overshadow
Cammell substantially for decades including such renowned modern classics as Don’t
Look Now, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing,
Insignificance and especially The Witches, something Cammell
would later resent Roeg for as the film’s bold and pioneering elliptical
editing style would become trademark across the rest of Roeg’s oeuvre.
The story, if there is a narrative in this hedonistic
odyssey through headspaces, seems to involve an East London gangster named Chas
(James Fox) whose job is to rough up debtors though for the most part its all
an act. However, following a dispute
with his boss over a betting shop resulting in the violent death of another
gangster, he dyes his hair red, dons sunglasses and a trenchcoat and ventures
out to the countryside to go hide for awhile.
Landing in the Notting Hill Gate home of Turner (Mick Jagger), a
hedonistic Bohemian ex-musician living with Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy
(Michele Breton) in a kind of drug and sex fueled hippie commune. Very quickly, the film becomes a late-sixties
countercultural reinterpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona with the
two vastly different lifestyles bleeding into one another. Aware of their new guest’s existential
crisis, a dose of psychedelic mushrooms and Pherber and Turner engage with Chas
into an androgynous, increasingly inebriated wallow into the inferno with Chas
as Dante and Turner as this Hellscape’s Virgil.
The violent, angry birth of a boldly new style of
storytelling and filmmaking, the emergence of Donald Cammell and particularly
Nicolas Roeg on the silver screen, Performance is maybe the most
singularly anarchic British film of the early 1970s next to A Clockwork
Orange, Straw Dogs and The Devils. The most aggressively abstractly weird
British film of the decade next to Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout,
another sensorial interpretive psychotronic freakout, the film features amid
the intentionally incoherent whirlwind editing of the first hour a gifted if
not David Hemmings-esque performance (no pun intended) from lead actor James
Fox. In the film’s early developmental
stages when it was more of a carefree comedy before evolving into a production
Warner Brothers wanted to wash their hands of, Marlon Brando was in
consideration for the Fox role.
Channeling Alain Delon’s Le Samourai in some respects before
gradually morphing into Syd Barrett, its a committed out-on-a-limb piece of
acting.
--Andrew Kotwicki