Performance
Overview
Chas (James Fox), a low-level gangster, fouls up a job and finds himself on the bad side of the Organization. Suddenly on the run, he dyes his hair with red paint, calls his Mum, and starts looking for a place to hide. When Chas overhears a bohemian type describe his vacant room, his scheming mind immediately seizes upon an idea, and he seeks out the boarding house as a supposed friend of the former tenant. He's given refuge in the home of reclusive, aging rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) and his lovely sidekick Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) by pretending to be a performer himself, with the ludicrous story of being a professional juggler who never once demonstrates his skills. Soon, Chas the macho mobster gets drawn into the daily life of the strange household. Upon the innocent ingestion of mind-expanding mushrooms, he finds his beliefs and his sense of identity completely undermined, as Turner and Pherber try to discover exactly what Chas's performance is hiding. Awash with ambiguous and graphic sexuality, inventive camerawork, and lush 1970s velvet-and-mirrors production design, PERFORMANCE trips along to a rock & roll soundtrack while asking the heavy questions of identity and gender which society at large was asking after the explosive excess of the 1960s.
Awards:
Main Cast & Crew:
Donald Cammell - Director
Nicolas Roeg - Director
James Fox
Mick Jagger
Anita Pallenberg
Michèle Breton
Ann Sidney
John Bindon
Stanley Meadows
Allan Cuthbertson
Anthony Morton
Johnny Shannon
Details
- Format: Blu-ray (Full Frame, Mono Sound)
- Color Format: Color
- UPC: 883316999325
- Genre: DRAMA
- Rating: NR
- Release Date: March 2014
Movie Reviews
Synopsis:
Chas, a low-level gangster on the run, takes refuge in the home of a reclusive, aging rock star. But as the macho mobster gets drawn into the daily life of the strange household, he finds his beliefs and his sense of identity completely undermined.
Notes:
Directorial debut for cinematographer Nicolas Roeg.
Film debut for Mick Jagger.
Reviews:
"Forty minutes of a great, hard-edged gangster movie morph briefly into a droll fish-out-of-water comedy..." -- Grade: B - 02/16/2007 Entertainment Weekly, p.64
"[I]t's as inspired, unconventional, individualistic, and irresponsible as it was 35 years ago....PERFORMANCE is a great film, a masterpiece, which adheres to few of the rules that define greatness." - 03/01/2007 Film Comment, p.74-75
4 stars out of 4 -- "[With] a remarkably indolent Mick Jagger, in his first and best stab and acting....A remarkably multilayered film." - 04/01/2007 Premiere, p.87
5 stars out of 5 -- "[Jagger] was at his power peak, a living social force: nothing less than a symbolic threat to civilisation itself." - 05/01/2007 Total Film, p.119
"PERFORMANCE remains as provocative as ever -- and one of the few truly visionary films made in the UK." - 05/01/2007 Sight and Sound, p.95
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