There are some things in life that I just can’t explain; things like biochemistry, astrophysics, the Dow Jones Industrial, and (to my wife) the legitimacy of the in-field fly rule. Seeing movies like Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970) makes me realize that I’ll never be able to explain the late sixties/early seventies to anyone either. I wasn’t there. It was before my time, and seeing films like this almost makes me grateful. That’s not to say that this is a bad movie, quite the opposite indeed, but it is a film that cannot be explained. I can think of few others which so abruptly change tone (maybe Full Metal Jacket; 1987). This is a strength of the film to be sure, but it might appear as a weakness to many filmgoers on first inspection.
As viewers we are conditioned to expect the first act of a film to logically set up the action to follow. As we sit, we often think about the potential outcomes to the situations set-up by the early segments of films. If our expectations for the movie are met, but not exactly as we predicted, then we typically think of the picture as a success. This has almost no resemblance to the way that life this side of the screen works at all. The choices we make leave almost limitless possibilities open. Who’s to say that a man being chased on the street is suddenly safe when he finds a door to walk into? What’s inside the door might be much worse than what he feared outside (see Pulp Fiction; 1994).
This is how a somewhat conventional gangster tale becomes an all-out bad trip in this 1970 offering. One of my first thoughts while watching this picture came as some hard cheese to swallow. Guy Ritchie, who directed two of my favorite films, 1998’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and 2000’s Snatch, is almost completely unoriginal. If you’re a fan of his work then the first half of Performance should be right up your ally, as it appears to be the mold from which his best work was cast. This doesn’t take away from the enjoyment of the two pictures listed above, but it does somewhat explain why Ritchie has done nothing original, or even all that different, since making them.
I was impressed here with the performance of James Fox, who for the second time in as many weeks has turned in a great showing on the list. He is so different here than in his work in The Servant (1963), and yet I see why he was attracted to both of these roles. Each film offers a glimpse of a world created inside of a London house that rejects the norms of the world outside of the front door. I mentioned in my review of The Servant that it captured the time just before London began to “swing.” Performance is then the other bookend to that time, chronicling the last gasp before the party was over.
Appropriately (and notoriously), the film costars Mick Jagger as the burned-out, gender bending and reclusive rock star Turner who Fox’s gangster-on-the-lamb encounters after a split with his underworld employer. What makes the world he walks into, and eventually is trapped in so creepy is that, crazy as it is, it doesn’t seem implausible, especially with Jagger basically just playing an exaggerated version of himself. The subtext here is clear after the Fox character claims to be a performer, a juggler to be specific, who is looking to rent the basement flat in Turner’s building. The film is a meditation on image vs. true identity, as everyone in the house embraces the former while repressing the latter.
Jagger’s presence here makes Performance ironically poignant. Not only does it bring to light the image-driven and ultimately shallow lifestyle he and his bandmates were making legendary during the time the film was shot, but it also foreshadows the music video element that would come to forever change the music industry. In the midst of a mind-blowing trip Fox’s character hallucinates that Turner is performing for his gangster crew, eventually inducing them into a homosexual orgy. The scene effectively serves as an early Rolling Stones video, as Jagger sings directly into the camera, breaking the forth wall. In doing so, he subconsciously concedes the truth evident to the audience all along; to the rock star, image is everything.
Grade: 2.5 Stars
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