Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

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.

DamonLewis92 I went in doing all my research on this movie. I read where it didn't good reviews when it first came out, it was violent and some lady vomited at the premiere. I don't know why that sticks out to me. But I knew it was gonna be either a love or hate movie, no in the middle. It started off good sure, a petty thief crosses his boss and goes on the run from the boss and ends up at Mick Jaggers house where it all falls apart. I hated the movie yes but I am still giving it a 5 star review out of 10. I like these late 60's early 70's British underworld crime movies. The Italian Job and Get Carter both come to mind. The cockney accents and just London at that time was the place to be. It was like looking in a time voretx of London in the 60's. Thats all the movies had going for it. But Mick Jagger and the other fellow dressing up like women and having gay sex. Nah just wasn't for me.

christopher-underwood I remember upon the film's release in 1970 that it wasn't the film most people expected. It wasn't the film I had expected. The Rolling Stones were not The Beatles, so this was never going to be A Hard Day's Night but even so for this to begin as a very violent and hard edged London crime gang movie a la Krays and not even feature Jagger for the first third, upset a lot of people. Viewed today, over forty years on, especially on Blu-ray, it is a revelation.Back in the day, so much had changed between 1968, when the film was made and 1970 when it was eventually released that some of us failed to appreciate how true a picture of disillusion it really was. Those dark and mysterious corners now fully illuminated and the milieu of the time so perfectly captured. Jagger's performance is quite amazing, as is that of the recently departed Anita Pallenberg. Some of the quick cut, fast edits anticipate Roeg's Don't Look Now opening but much of the latter part of the film takes place in a murky bath or large bed. The decor and language seem perfect with all the nonsense making complete sense. Fabulous and invigorating. James Fox isn't bad either!

Roman James Hoffman 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.