Performance

When Keith Carradine was TCM Guest Programmer last month, one of his selections sounded interesting, Performance. So I DVRed it and watched it since it's available on DVD.

James Fox plays Chas, a gangster in London at the end of the 1960s. He's particularly brutal, and we get to see it since this is just after the end of the Production Code. In addition to violence against people who need being enforced against for running afoul of the gang "protection", there's a scene of Chas and his underlings taking acid to a Rolls Royce (the acid that eats away at paint and metal, not acid the drug, which other people will drop later in the movie).

For whatever reason, Chas' violence bothers his bosses, who try to get him to tone it down, and when he doesn't take the hint, they send a couple of guys to his house to beat him up. Not only that, but they try to get him to admit to being gay, which he isn't, but that's part of humiliating him. Chas has a gun hidden in his apartment, and it leads to a struggle for the gun that winds up with one of the gangsters getting shot to death. So now Chas is really a marked man.

In trying to escape, Chas overhear a musician who had a buddy who had to vacate a basement room owing back rent. Chas gets the address and goes there, since it's the last place the gangsters would think to look, essentially being a random address. Chas goes there and the woman who answers the door is at first reluctant to let him have the rom, but eventually does, for one night at least. That's not enough time for Chas to get the fake passport he needs, but once in, he can always try to convince his landlord to let him stay longer.

Of course, Chas has a rather odd landlord, in the form of rock star Turner (Mick Jagger), who has dropped out of performing and is now secluded in his decaying London mansion. Turner has a pair of girlfriends in Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton). As Turner gets to know Chas, the two form an uneasy relationship, with Turner seemingly not quite wanting Chas around, and knowing fully well Chas is being less than honest about his background.

Turner has a further twist up his sleeve. As you might expect of a secluded rock star dropping out of life in the late 60s, he's into drugs, especially in the form of magic mushrooms. And he slips some of the drug to Chas, which makes things really get strange....

When I saw the cast and read the synopsis, I thought Performance looked like it would be interesting. It certainly was, although it's also definitely not without its flaws. The gang violence of the first section of the movie was well-done, although it reminded me of A Clockwork Orange in the sense that it was portrayed in a way that really left me cold. The second half of the movie at Turner's mansion, especially once Chas takes some of the mushrooms, bends reality, which also makes the movie hard to follow at times. There's also a lot of sex in the movie, intercut in a way that, as with the violence, left me cold.

I think the fairest thing to say about Performance is that it's a movie that's really going to appeal to some people, and definitely be a huge turn-off to others. I'm not quite in the turn-off camp, but I'm also not the sort of person that the movie is geared to. If you're interested in something psychedleic and challenging, you may want to give Performance a try.