Performance acquires cult status
“I know who I am,” insists Chas, the murderous gangster of the controversial 1970 British film Performance.
But like many of the other films by co-director Nicholas Roeg, questions of identity nevertheless loom large in Performance.
The film’s plot suggests its controversial nature. The violent Chas (James Fox) kills another thug for personal reasons, but because the victim of Chas’ vengeful wrath works for the same boss, Mr. Big orders a hit on him (“What do you do with a mad dog?”). On the lam, Chas lays low in a weird guest house run by the mysterious Mr. Turner (Mick Jagger), a former rock star. Encouraged by sex, drugs, rock and roll, and odd goings-on, the undermining of Chas’s complacency begins.
The descent of this underworld character into a different kind of underworld is amplified by Roeg’s trademark flashy editing. Roeg understands how the camera works, having begun his career as an editor’s apprentice and eventually becoming a cinematographer of note. Among films he shot before moving into the director’s chair are Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and the best of Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations, The Masque of the Read Death (1964), with its gorgeous and thematic use of colour.
Roeg ’s unconventional editing moves freely through time and space, mirroring and amplifying the dissolution of selfhood that many of his characters experience. As in his other films Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980), there are flashbacks and flash forwards, montages, visual associations and inserts, odd camera movements and angles, all conveying information some of which we cannot understand until later.
The casting of Jagger as Turner is crucial to understanding Performance. Jagger introduced a pronounced bisexuality to rock ’n’ roll iconography, before later
artists like David Bowie. This gender fluidity carries over into his performance in Performance and into the film itself.
Roeg liked working with rock stars. It is no coincidence that he cast (brilliantly) Bowie as the alien Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).
Unfortunately, he also cast Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing.
Jagger’s presence in Performance is important in another way, as the film perhaps gives us better than any other, including Richard Lester’s more well-known films with The Beatles, what “Swinging London” at the time was about.
But whatever value Performance may have didn’t stop critics at the time from vilifying it. The snooty John Simon famously dismissed it as “indescribably sleazy, self-indulgent and meretricious,” a movie that “might be best enjoyed by drug addicts, pederasts, sadomasochists and nitwits,” while in Time magazine Richard Shickel called it “the most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing.”
Such reviews, of course, have only helped to build the film’s cult status.
Co-director Donald Cammell would go on to direct only two other features, but one of them, Demon Seed (1977), starred Julie Christie as a scientist’s wife who is imprisoned, raped and impregnated by a rogue computer (“Never was a woman violated as profanely … Never was a woman subject to inhuman love like this.”) boasted the film’s advertising copy. Likely Demon Seed provided Simon and Shickel with further evidence of its makers’ moral deficiency.
Almost alone in defending Performance was Pauline Kael, who praised the film for its thoroughly cinematic presentation of maintaining one’s sense of identity amid all the noise and kibble of modern culture. But whether Performance is egregious exploitation or edifying entertainment is ultimately for each viewer to decide.