Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Tin_ear The movie hinges on the premise that if you put a hippy-looking wig on somebody that they'll be indistinguishable from anyone with long hair. Needless to say Mick Jagger and James Fox don't resemble each other or sound like each other whatsoever. In fact Mick is world renown for having a distinct, weird-looking face.The Fox character is reprehensible and Jagger's character...is also there, for some reason. And there's tits. People watch this because it's an art film. I can't imagine it being green-lighted by a studio if Jagger's face wasn't on the poster. At this point Roeg was just a cinematographer. Cammell would later wind up directing music videos. Neither had any directing experience, and it shows.

Art Vandelay After the p-rnographic opening sequence there are about 15 minutes of compelling 70s British crime drama. Then Fox goes on the run and the whole movie swirls irretrievably into the toilet. There's more p-rn, this time with Anita Pallenberg looking like she's strung out on heroin. There's a boy(?) in a dress or is that just a fat ugly girl? There's Mick Jagger looking as pale as death. I can't be the only one on Earth who thinks this - isn't he about the ugliest human being not named Carrot Top or Steven Tyler (Aerosmith)? What a mess. Roeg must have consumed a metric tonne of drugs in his day to have churned out movie after movie after movie of self-indulgent, p- rnographic drivel.

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.

tieman64 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.