PERFORMANCE (1970)

It’s tempting to call Performance a one-of-a-kind film. It’s equally tempting to say there’s nothing else like it. But the truth is that Performance isn’t even like itself. It opens with a Concorde zooming overhead in a deafening roar, the air ripped open—and it’s as if the film is torn to shreds from this first moment. It can feel like a re-assembly of scattered parts, a film actively inventing and destroying itself, serpentine in the way it moves and shifts. It was released in 1970, and so the beginning feels more like an end—the end of the 1960s, and the end of an old way of doing things.

Chas (James Fox), a low-ranking East London gangster, is part of the old ways. He’s a pugilist with a glint of pleasure in his eyes whenever he gets to rough someone up. He’s lean and tightly wound, always in a suit and always thinking about his next act of violence. He’s like a more sprightly Michael Caine, and a sort of inverse of The Jackal, the gun-for-hire that James Fox’s brother Edward Fox played in The Day of the Jackal (1973). Each actor suggests a kind of violence, but Chas has not modernised his operation; he’s not silent and unemotional like the character his brother would play.

He fights, punches, threatens, shoots, but what he really does is humiliate. He shaves the head of an unlucky chauffeur, but not before he’s poured acid over his Rolls Royce. He calls men older than him ‘son’, and slaps women during sex. In his world, violence and sex are the same thing, pain and pleasure symbiotic, and his boss, Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon) has noticed. After telling Chas that he’s old fashioned, Harry cautions him not to mine too much pleasure from his work. He’s a “cog in the organ of the business”, he’s told, and the “business of the business is to push buttons”. Whatever that means. What it translates to in actuality is extortion and robbery, porno films and forced takeovers of local businesses.

Harry, a stressed and bloated rotter, talks as if his underlings are all unruly foster-children giving him a migraine, but he’s not so dense that he doesn’t know how to make business sound good. “You weren’t taken over”, he tells the manager of a bookie, arm around his shoulder, “you were merged, my son”. Mergers and acquisitions, words of business designed to sugar-coat violent invasions. Under the new jargon, the gangster breathing down your neck is actually just your business partner, and your extortion payments are really just taxes. There’s a constant news hum in the background, and there are other invasions there—Harry talks of the “strife” in Vietnam, and bemoans “bloody foreign parasites”—and is there really much difference between the rhetoric of the ‘firm’ and the rhetoric of the government? Somehow they each find a way to convince the oppressed that they’re on their side, only wanting what’s best for them.

If this all sounds on paper like conventional proto-Guy Ritchie gangsterism, then it’s a case of doublespeak: the relatively simple story is abstracted through a wildly complex visual language that seems both carefully considered and totally impulsive. Directors Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell (who also wrote the screenplay) seem to have dipped the film stock in LSD. While Harry chastises Chas, everything turns blue; individual scenes flash forward or backward in time, almost interrupting themselves; audio overlaps constantly—we never quite know when or where we are. We learn quite quickly that we are not being fed clues, that we are not puzzling things out. We are watching free-association—in one scene, an ingenious cut has Chas seemingly answer a statement just spoken by Harry, before we realise this is much later on, and Chas is on the phone to somebody entirely different.

But the directors, along with editor Anthony Gibbs, drop this response, this flash-forward, into this specific moment, as if time is manipulable, as if a conversation can be had across time, as if there isn’t a barrier between then and now, between thoughts and actions, between memory and experience. It’s all just happening, moments crashing into each other like trains of thought colliding, and Jack Nitzsche’s anxious electronic soundtrack is so loud and needling that we barely even realise we are leaning in to try and hear over it. It’s as if you are trying to count to ten, and the directors are shouting out randomised numbers to trip you up. You can’t hear your own voice, your own thoughts. You begin to wonder if you both continue this way if you’ll end up talking as one.

“Go to hell. I know what I am”, Chas responds when the firm remind him of his place. It’s not who he is, it’s what he is. Harry reminds them Chas is their “best performer”—and is this it? Is being a gangster just using the right language and wearing the right clothes? Is it performing, acting? And if it’s true of them, and it might be true of any of us, who exactly do we model ourselves on? Did Chas always act like this, or is he emulating Harry? A hostile takeover isn’t limited to businesses—it can apply to people, too. You could almost see Harry, his nicotine-stained teeth, his hairy back and string vests, physically absorbing Chas.

This might explain why Chas acts out of turn, demolishes a shopfront, shoots a colleague, causes some bad publicity, and has to go on the run. Harry, who lifts a pint and says ‘to old England’, wants Chas dead for his misbehaviour. Certainly, a life on the run is more appealing than becoming a new grafted limb for his boss, hoping, at the very best, that he won’t be rejected, severed and discarded. Before the bad behaviour, and possibly the cause of that behaviour, Harry sits down with Chas and tells him to speak his catchphrase. “What’s my motto?”, he prompts. Like a punished schoolboy writing his atonement, Chas recites: “At the death, who is left holding the sodding baby?”. “I am”, responds Harry. How many times have they done this before?

After escaping the East End, Chas winds up in Notting Hill, scamming his way into a basement flat in a large Victorian townhouse. Roeg and Cammell angle their cameras so the building looks like an object that has crash landed from another planet—Nitzsche’s score here turns to twangy guitars, the house in a different land entirely to the smokey bars, snooker tables and pint glasses of Chas’s previous life. Here Chas becomes ‘Johnny Dean’, a touring juggler, an artist, looking for a quiet place to hide out and work on his act. Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) is too intrigued by this strange man (he has dyed his hair a dark, blood-red and his face is bloodied from a beating) to ask much more, but landlord Turner (Mick Jagger) doesn’t want “anyone in my lovely basement”.

In Pherber and Turner’s flat, along with the third member of their ménage à trois, Lucy (Michele Breton), magic mushrooms are grown and eaten, walls are carpeted, and ethereal sitar music plays on an endless loop. They make love and bathe together, they pontificate and submerge themselves in deep reds and white smoke, lost in their gaze, and in their thoughts… or lack thereof. Turner’s a capitalist, and he’s vain. Touching his mop of black, styled hair, he asks pointlessly aloud: “shall I wash my hair?”.

He used to be a musician—the child who ostensibly lives somewhere in the house, Lorraine (Larraine Wickens) claims he was actually a superstar—and is now working on a book, which is the kind of thing that a person says when they don’t have much else going on. He’s a landlord, keeping his hipster credentials with side-eye suspicions of anyone square—but he’ll take anyone’s money just the same. He agrees to let Chas stay a night at a time. Chas doesn’t know who Turner is, and likewise, Turner doesn’t really know if Chas is a juggler or a gangster. It’s mutually beneficial. It’s better not to know.

And besides, with a handsome man, stiff and upright in a smart suit milling around, Turner has someone to perform for. His lips are lined red, he’s sultry and seductive, and Chas is a motorised mannequin. Their energies clash, and it’s erotic rather than mismatched. Chas, as well as needing a place to hide out, needs a photograph of him in a decent disguise so that he can accrue a phoney passport and head to America. Everyone is talking about going somewhere else, particularly America, as if they’re out of things to do at home and want to build a new colony. There’s something parasitic about Chas, Turner, and Harry—attaching themselves to new places and new hosts, taking over piece by piece.

When Turner sings and plays guitar, it’s songs by people like bluesman Robert Johnson. Chas hearing about the flat in the first place (and lying his way into becoming a tenant) was only achieved by him eavesdropping on the conversation of a black guitar player at a railway station. Is there anything that Turner and Chas have gained by themselves, or is it all theft and absorption? Socially, culturally, ethnically—there’s little they won’t take. The songs, identities, names of other people, are scattered about like garments in a costume trunk. During a prolonged and utterly entrancing mushroom trip sequence (it takes up the best part of the film’s middle section), Chas ends up looking like a bohemian artist, and, hair slicked back and suit donned, Turner is now a cockney gangster. In Chas’s trip, he sees Turner singing a blazing rock and roll number to the firm: “gentlemen, you all belong to me”.

Chas hates it there (“It’s a right pisshole. Beatniks, druggies, free love, foreigners, you name it”), but is he protesting too much? Does he not feel the mutual attraction between him and Turner, and would it really have taken hallucinogens to get him to dress in women’s clothing? “That’s sad”, Pherber sighs when Chas tells her he never feels like a woman, only like a man. His machismo, and his anger at the insinuation—at the idea he’d ever sleep with Turner—seems so futile and ineffective at this point. Harry was right, Chas is old fashioned, and under Turner’s roof, under the influence of drugs, he’s trying to hold up the dusty old pillars of his identity with a broken back. Artists become businessmen; businessmen get bored and run off to become artists. People sell out, pack up, move on. Or they obliterate themselves, lost between the markers and signifiers, but whom is obliterating whom here?

Desire is all over Performance, a type of desire that almost requires hypnosis to be called up. But it is there. It’s desire not just to be with someone else, but to actually become them. It’s wanting to transcend your identity and all that makes it up—gender, sexuality, voice, posture, clothes, career—and for that foregoing of your personality to allow for a new freedom, a freedom to indulge and live as desired. The desire needs a practical excuse—“you couldn’t find a better little hidey hole” Chas says about the house—if only to offer some plausible deniability. We’re always searching for ways to cover up and explain away our behaviour, especially when we don’t even understand the behaviour.

And if Performance is about the desire to change spiritually, sexually, visually, it’s also about cynicism and manipulation, and the desire to subsume, to destroy through control. Chiefly, it’s about the way in which an entity, be it a person or a business or a government, can use the verbiage of change to hide in plain sight. It’s banks pretending they are your pals, oil companies positioning themselves as activists, bullies posing as allies. If we keep changing and adapting to survive within these parameters then how will we ever be able to tell to whom we belong? Did we ever belong to ourselves?

Performance exists in the moments directly after the doors of perception had been blown off their hinges, when everybody began to look alike, when corporations became people, and when actual people started wondering just where the hell the world would find room for them. Nevertheless, a good act, a good grift—a good performance—might mean the masters keep us around a little longer—if that’s really what we want from this deal. Changing to fit the needs of our desires, of the culture, of the country, it’s all the same, all so horribly limited. We’re broken up into individual shards of glass under late capitalism, like little broken mirrors that can only repeat the world around us, not the world within, which we drift further away from each day. 55 years on, having given more and more of ourselves to the needs of business and country, and only able to offer the most feeble of personal protests, Performance is more maddening, more truthful, than ever. We may have lost ourselves in the smoke and noise and money, but don’t worry—it’s not a takeover, it’s just a merger.

UK | 1970 | 105 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Special Features:

This 4K restoration was approved by producer Sandy Lieberson, and it looks astonishing. The richness of the film’s colours, especially the contrast between the grey and blue East End with the reds of the flat, are a particular highlight. The HDR Dolby Vision on the 4K disc gives the film an almost glowing quality, a truly beautiful thing to behold. The level of detail on display is another highlight—it’s particularly fun to nose around Chas’s flat and spot his tacky ephemera (particularly the oversized Playboy lighter on the coffee table).

The sound, a monaural, uncompressed presentation of the original UK soundtrack, is one of the most thrilling aspects of the release. Jack Nitzsche’s complex, varied soundtrack is at the forefront, and the musical numbers have a true aliveness. Particularly notable is the level of detail in the sound mix here—disembodied lines are almost whispered, thoughts trail off, and with this release you can truly get lost in the mix, which is exactly what Roeg and Cammell would have wanted.

• Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance (1998), a documentary by Kevin Macdonald and Chris Rodley. Insightful and sad in equal measure, this documentary is over an hour long and delves into the complicated life of Donald Cammell, including interviews with the man himself. It’s remarkably unrestrained and honest—an absolutely essential watch for fans of the film, but also for anyone interested in British filmmaking.
• Influence and Controversy: Making “Performance” (2007), a documentary about the making of the film. A half-hour feature from a previous release, this is a series of talking heads that is far more interesting than it looks. There’s a lot of research here, and some essential information, even if after the Cammell documentary it comes across as slightly staid.
• The True Story of David Litvinoff, a new visual essay by Keiron Pim, biographer of dialogue coach and technical adviser David Litvinoff. This is a brilliant supplement about a man Keith Richards described as being on the ‘border between art and villainy’. This dives into Litvinoff and his connections to the world of crime, and how that information was utilised in the making of Performance.
• Performers on ‘Performance,’ a documentary featuring actors James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and others. Another good documentary, with some essential testimony from the actors who were there.
• The Two Cockneys of Harry Flowers, a program on the dialogue overdubbing done for the U.S. version of the film. Is it impossible to imagine that anyone thought dubbing the actors would work, and the hilariously misguided attempt to do so is captured in this supplement.
• Memo from Turner, a program featuring behind-the-scenes footage.
• Trailer.
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Ryan Gilbey and a 1995 article by filmmaker and scholar Peter Wollen.
• New cover by Fred Davis.

Cast & Crew

directors: Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg.
writer: Donald Cammell.
starring: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michèle Breton, Ann Sidney, John Bindon & Stanley Meadows.