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PERFORMANCE
Nicolas Roeg & Donald Cammell, UK, 1970
BBC Two Monday 2 January 2006 11.35pm-1.15am
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"This is a film about vice and versa," proclaimed trailers for Performance when it eventually reached cinemas in 1970, roughly two years after it was made. During the intervening period, the distributors famously deliberated over how to handle this experimental and enigmatic foray into brutality and bohemianism.
Vice and versa: the snappy line not only captured the lively wordplay in Donald Cammell's script but also encapsulated a film immersed in mirror images and pairs. There were two men behind the camera and two above the title. Co-directed by Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, who also doubled up as photographer, the film cast Rolling Stone Mick Jagger alongside The Servant's James Fox.
Fox plays Chas, a cutthroat gangster with a taste for extravagant torture. Jagger stars as Turner, a narcissistic musician whose retirement has turned him into a hermit. When Chas runs into trouble with his East End crew - including his sinister, grinning gang boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon) - he's forced into hiding. By chance, he gets wind of a recently-vacated room at Turner's Notting Hill home. Once the front door is closed, Chas is precipitated headfirst into the opulently exotic lifestyle of his elegantly wasted host and two seductive houseguests, Pherber, an alluring Anita Pallenberg, and Lucy, the freckly, boyish Michele Breton.
From the very beginning, this boldly inventive British picture interweaves and juxtaposes scenes in order to align Fox's Chas with Jagger's Turner, whose full entrance is tantalizingly held back. Eventually, the film morphs the identities of all four residents, often using a magician's sleight of hand like the sequence where Jagger's character rolls over in bed and turns into Lucy.
Steeped in hearsay from its production onwards, Performance has continually courted controversy. It has been condemned as a baffling and repellent potpourri of sex and violence but has also been praised as a genuinely challenging and subversive masterpiece. Perhaps the truth about this cult classic lies somewhere in between.
Chris Wiegand
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Sympathy for the Devil (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968)
