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-members 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 passport 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 members 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.

We watched this last night. My partner has been waxing lyrical about this films for as long as we've been together. i've always been fairly resistant to be honest - I've always enjoyed listening to the Stones, but never really got 'The Stones'. As far as I was concerned they are rock legends, sure but that's about the size of it. Their really great mid sixties stuff was contemporary Waaaaay before my time. I really didn't get the whole Stones mystique. Well, I can say I now get it. Wow do I! I can't say I've ever been a massive believer in the 'Mick Jagger Sex God' hype. But I can see why he had the rep he did - So dark and alluring and dangerously different. This film has certainly opened my eyes up to a whole new world ... I'm really looking forward to re-listening to their albums with this new world view.

Often cited as one of the greatest films in British Cinema, 'Performance' is a hallucinogenic trip (pun intended) through London's criminal underworld, the tentative edifice of identity, and the whole glorious mess of psychotropic drug-soaked late 1960s pop-culture when flower-power was beginning to wilt and swinging London was beginning to sway. Rolling Stone singer Mick Jagger plays Turner, a has-been rock star ensconced in his Notting Hill mansion living a life of orgiastic decadence with the spellbinding Pherber (Pallenberg) and exquisitely androgynous Lucy (Breton) in an atmosphere where money floats idly on bath water and psilocybin mushrooms are served for breakfast…until one day Chas (Fox), an on-the-run South London gangland hood, knocks on his door seeking solace under the guise of being a juggler. It doesn't take long for Turner and Co. to cotton onto the ruse and, voyeuristically fascinated by the implications of the violent underworld Chas inhabits, indulge in a bizarre rite where definitions of violence and sexuality are explored, and identity is deconstructed.Many rumours surround the film which no doubt got the green light from execs who, in seeing the name of a Rolling Stone attached, no doubt envisioned a film-pop hybrid like 'A Hard Day's Night'. However, 'Performance' is as far away from a mainstream-baiting, tongue-in-cheek romp as you can get. Instead it is a raw and (in more than one sense) adult film which is transgressive and deviant in every respect. One such rumour has it that at a screening for the studio executives one exec wife vomited, while another was apparently heard to say "…even the bath water was dirty". What is sure is that, after various cuts and re-edits, the film was shelved for 2 years after it was finished, not seeing the light of day until 1970. Saying this, by modern standards this seems a quaint over-reaction: modern pop videos are arguably more erotic than the nudity and the sex scenes between Jagger and Pallenberg come across as positively tasteful, although another rumour has it that the sex wasn't simulated and was indeed real (which no doubt *cough* annoyed Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who Pallenberg was officially with at the time) and that out-takes from the scene were shown at adult movie festivals. Modern audiences may also smirk a little at the depiction of drug-taking in the film which lacks both the glamour of Scorcese-style fistfuls-of-coke-flung-into-the-air as well as the searing gritty realism of films like 'Christiane F' or 'Trainspotting'.Okay, sure…the film is dated somewhat (even down to the casting of Jagger who, after emerging from his late 60s, dissolute, "Baudelaire phase", ended up symbolising the mainstream and entering the establishment!) but we need to respect the fact that it was films like 'Performance' which broke new ground wherein these other films would follow. Secondly, I would argue the violence in the first half of the film still actually packs a punch today in terms of grittiness, the conflation made between violence and sex, as well as the implications of homosexuality within the gangland world which, it should be remembered, was still a tangible presence in late-60s London owing to the Kray brothers and their "Firm". Thirdly, it should be noted that for all its explictness, the drug-taking, sex, and violence in the film are merely vehicles for the grander ruminations on identity that are the heart of the film.Out of the directorial duo of Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell it is Roeg who, with the acclaimed 'The Man who Fell to Earth' and the bewilderingly beautiful 'Don't Look Now', went onto to establish himself as a director of some standing while Cammell struggled to get his various projects off the ground…but 'Performance' should really be recognised as Cammell's baby as its content is a clear articulation of his musings and fetishes, from organised crime to drugs to threesomes and to the work of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, in collections like 'Fictions' and 'Labyrinths' wrote short stories in a magic realist style which collapsed the distinctions between imagination and reality and created worlds of confusion which elicit awe in the possibilities that open up. As Turner himself says in the film, "nothing is true…everything is permitted". What's more, a copy of a book by Borges is seen lying in the apartment, Turner's speech references Borges' stories several times, and in the climatic confrontation at the end of the film the image looming towards us as we are fired into Turner's brain is none other than Borges himself. A curious and morbid post-script to this is that after being all but completely rejected by Hollywood for years after 'Performance' Cammell killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head…however, death wasn't immediate and after shooting himself he walked around for sometime, even claiming to his partner that he "couldn't see Borges".Such stories of madness run all though the circumstances of the genesis of 'Performance' as well as through the film itself. Certainly, much more could be said about the film as in coming from the abyss the film permits an interpretation as deep as you care to take it. What is sure is that it's a unique film born of a unique vision operating in unique times and, although dated in parts, serves as both a document of the time, a manifesto of madness, and simply just has to be seen.

James Fox plays Chas, a East London gangster who delights in sadism, sex, misogyny and violence. He works for Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), whose orders he disobeys by murdering a low life called Joey Maddocks. Chas is forced to go on the run, the police and Flowers' henchmen hot on his heels. The film is concerned with Chas' chameleon like transformation, as he alters himself in an attempt to remain off the radar. In this regard he dyes his hear, changes his mannerisms and ingratiates himself with the androgynous Turner, played by Rolling Stones front-man Mick Jagger. "I'm determined to fit in. I've got to fit in," he begs, and Jagger obliges, introducing Chas to hallucinogenic drugs, homosexuality, femininity and his fuzzy concepts of "love". End result: Chas drops his previous psycho-sexual, violent, dominative, masculine hangups and becomes a happy drag queen. Think of Jagger as an X rated Deepak Chopra. The film was directed by Nicolas Roeg, whose customarily unconventional editing techniques elevate the film tremendously. Roeg turns the plot into a kaleidoscopic, hallucinogenic identity crisis ("I know who I am," Chas unconvincingly repeats throughout the film), using a non linear, sliding, elliptical editing style to suggest the breaking down and piecing together of Chas' identity. For Roeg, the goal is for anima and animus to collide through technique. His shots are like the drug tainted fragments of a vast mosaic, the final image fuzzy and confusing at first, until each new added piece completes and concretizes the picture. Roeg's editing was breathtaking during this period, culminating in such great films as "Walkabout" and "Don't Look Now". The film ends with Chas transforming into Turner and vice versa, the former adopting a wig, costume and makeup. Chas' face even literally becomes Turner's and Roeg goes so far as to use mirrors and subtle shots to overlay female breasts on Chas' own chest, blurring his psycho-sexual identity. Actor James Fox found the production so disturbing and disorienting that he left acting and fled into religious retreat for nearly a decade. Mick Jagger went on to become a giant sex God.7.9/10 – Hugely influential, but somewhat dated. How do you rate a film that plays like a cross between Guy Ritchie and Catherine Breillat? Incidentally, Roeg's "The Man Who Fell To Earth" presents the flip-side of Chas' transformation, musician David Bowie transforming from androgynous, sexless rock star, to phallus incarnate.