Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.
Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
rodrig58 I've been waiting for decades to see this movie and finally I've done it. My interest was very high, considering the names of the two directors and a few names in the cast. Well, I was very disappointed. Most of the other reviewers gave it 10 stars. I can not give it more than 1 star, that is the minimum possible. Because I didn't like anything, the story is particularly irrelevant, nothing makes sense. Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton show their empty bodies absolutely free to the time, almost half of the movie that's what we see. I can not even talk about their "acting" performance... I like Mick Jagger, as a singer, in Rolling Stones, but as an actor, really... James Fox is a good actor, but he has no place in this movie. Static, boredom, big waste of time!
lasttimeisaw Wringing the ethos out of the vestige of beatnik and swinging 60s, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's hallucinogenic cult film PERFORMANCE (which marks both filmmakers' directorial feature debut), was made in 1968 but mothballed by the studio for two years due to its obscene sexual contents and explicit violence. For a new audience, it is fairly natural to get dumbfounded by the film's frenetic editing of montages from the very start, amalgamating graphic sex sequences between our protagonist Chas (Fox) and his casual bed-mate Dana (Sidney) with manifold clumps of irrelevant scenes which later rig up a flimsy narrative, it is a sharp, disorientating gambit, but seems too divisive by half (it is a post-production last resort to mitigate the smutty images at the expense of its own impetus and coherence as a dauntless cause célèbre by this reviewer's lights). Chaz is an aggro-prone tearaway working for the gang of Harry Flowers (a corn-fed Johnny Shannon), but before long he needs to lie low after rubbing out an attacker of bad blood out of self-defense, since Harry wants him vanish as well. So he hangs his hat in the basement of a decrepit residence owned by a former rock star Turner (Mick Jagger's acting debut), who has lost his demon in what he does and secludes himself from the outside world, co-habits with his lover Pherber (the late Pallenberg, a là Warhol's Factory Girl) and a young French girl Lucy (a tomboyish Breton), the equilibrium of their boho ménage-à-trois will dutifully be ruffled (not exactly challenged as we tend to surmise judging by its cover) by Chaz, an unbidden outsider under the pseudonym of Johnny Dean.The premise sounds promising for making a heavy weather of the underlying discrepancy/assimilation between two male ids: Chaz's macho/gangsta make-up and Turner's androgynous and lackadaisical stagnation, but in reality, however visually psychedelic the film looks (Dutch angles, a distorted God's viewpoint shot, mesmeric mirror images, that creepy identity-shifting moment in the end, just to name a few), the fundamentals are only scratched skin- deep, often to one's aggravation, instead, it evolves into a dashing and dazing shindig of excesses (nudity rather than sex) and a madcap platform for Turner/Jagger's superstar glamour (who performs the theme song MEMO FROM TURNER in the MTV style, avant la lettre). Notorious for its under-the-influence verité carried out during the filmmaking (there is literal acid involved in the plot where Chaz and co. terrorizing a hapless chauffeur), PERFORMANCE ultimately comes off as a short-range stunner and an experimental novelty which cannot elevate its own perversity and subversion into something significantly revolutionary and groundbreaking, although James Fox is arguably in his most absorbing and ambiguously sensual form here. At odds with the state of those participated, PERFORMANCE is more stultifying than stupefying from the POV of a first-time viewer in the 21st century, that ship has long sailed, save for its skirling soundtrack, operatively transmitting those signs of bygone times into one's nostalgic delirium.
seymourblack-1 It's fascinating to see how this movie which was made in the late 1960s, develops from a routine crime drama into an exploration of the nature of identity, sexuality and reality. By the standards of the time, it was clearly ambitious, innovative and challenging but that's only half the story because its dazzling visual style, which facilitates the process so effectively, was also an introduction to the highly individual approach which became such a familiar feature of co-director Nicolas Roeg's later films. Montages, superimposed images and editing that intentionally disrupts the chronology of the narrative, are just some of the stylistic flourishes that are used to good effect in "Performance" to blur the lines between various identities and what's real and what's imagined.Chas (James Fox) is a sadistic young criminal who works as an enforcer for London crime boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon). He's well-dressed, very good at his job and recognised by his fellow gang- as someone who really enjoys his work. His ability to terrorise people into seeing the benefits of the "protection" that his boss' organisation provides is also well recognised but when he gets involved in a job where a man he's known since childhood is involved, things go badly because he hates the guy and kills him. This doesn't go down well with Harry Flowers and so to save his own life, Chas immediately has to go on the run. A conversation he overhears in a railway station waiting room alerts him to the fact that there could be a vacant apartment in Notting Hill Gate which he could use as a temporary hideout.At the mansion of retired rock star Turner (Mick Jagger), Chas introduces himself as Johnny Dean and claims to be a professional juggler. His new surroundings are not what he expects because the rather eccentric Turner lives with a couple of bi-sexual women called Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michele Breton). Chas tries to change his appearance by dying his hair and only intends to stay in his basement accommodation until he can get his hands on a forged port and leave the country for good.Chas' initial antipathy to the lifestyle of the house's other three residents who regularly sleep and bath together slowly changes after he gets to know Pherber more closely and begins to take on some of Turner's characteristics. The faded rock star had given up his career when he'd lost his "demon" which had been the source of his inspiration and creativity and starts to see Chas (who also considers himself a performer) as possessing some quality which might enable him to recover his lost muse. The mind games and hallucinogenic mushrooms that Chas is then exposed to, change him profoundly, but will this bring back Turner's demon? The musical number in which Turner assumes Chas' identity in an imagined situation where he interacts with other of the Flowers gang is brilliantly conceived, highly entertaining and thoroughly consistent with the movie's main themes. It also forms part of a soundtrack that's perfect for this exceptional film.The use of androgynous characters (Lucy and Turner), gay gangsters and visual references to the works of Francis Bacon and Jorge Luis Borges also provide indications of some of the plot's preoccupations but it's the recurring use of mirrors that ultimately provides the movie with its most memorable motif. With excellent performances, especially from Jagger and Fox and its ground-breaking visual techniques, "Performance" is definitely a movie that's not to be missed.
Nooblethenood I suppose I come to this from a slightly difficult perspective, having seen some of Nicolas Roeg's more recent films before this. Compared with the rest of his output, as far as I can see, this is far superior, but it's not so easy to judge things impartially with exposure to so much inferior work.In any case, certainly this feels like the most successful of Roeg's films. Of course, I recognise his is co-director and co-producer, but his visual style is immediately obvious. This comes with its problems. For a cinematographer, he is surprisingly shy of framing shots very carefully. There is a very spontaneous, somewhat 'wobbly' quality to much of the visuals in Performance. However, in this instance this does rather fit with the atmosphere and aesthetic of the whole thing. It is, after all, the story of a deeply troubled young man, swinging between excesses of violence, sex, cultural and social self-discovery and all that. That having been said, however, again in a rather typical Roeg foible, none of those themes is really investigated. Everything is on the outside, a simple, visual experience of a few people's lives coming into confusion with each other. Not necessarily a bad thing, but with little story to speak of, one is rather left wondering what was the point of it all.The film, though, does give a striking portrait of a particular kind of social existence, one that was current at the time of its making, but in truth is probably applicable at most times and in most places. The suggestion that the criminal and bourgeois margins of society actually have much in common in of the nature of their somewhat teetering existence is a valid one. It's interestingly portrayed, and certainly eccentrically so. The performances are convincing, as you would expect, and unlike David Bowie's presence in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth', you don't ever feel that Jagger is simply trading on his familiarly odd outward character - there is a genuine enigmatic quality to his performance, and it brings something to the atmosphere of the film. James Fox, again, is on good form, if often called upon to manifest a limited palette of expressions of confusion and inner turmoil - a fuller script would have benefited this.All in all, a very atmospheric film with a certain captivating music to it, and certainly the only film of Roeg's that I have ever found to be really successful.
