rodrig58 I've been waiting for decades to see this movie and finally I've done it. My interest was very high, considering the names of the two directors and a few names in the cast. Well, I was very disappointed. Most of the other reviewers gave it 10 stars. I can not give it more than 1 star, that is the minimum possible. Because I didn't like anything, the story is particularly irrelevant, nothing makes sense. Anita Pallenberg and Michèle Breton show their empty bodies absolutely free to pass the time, almost half of the movie that's what we see. I can not even talk about their "acting" performance... I like Mick Jagger, as a singer, in Rolling Stones, but as an actor, really... James Fox is a good actor, but he has no place in this movie. Static, boredom, big waste of time!

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.

seymourblack-1 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.

tedg In retrospect, we completely ignore key tipping points, because they become accepted horizons behind us. Only if you are there, or have an insightful observer can you even capture the notion that something radical is going on. An extra bite of toast here, a missed appointment there, a chance with a girl — these will flip a switch and everyone on the planet could have rain instead of sun.I believe that for a few years there was immense power in the Beatles, Stones and Dylan. Not them so much, but in the allure that this form of new public archetypes offered. Decisions they made mattered, because so much weight of soul was loaded onto their trains.Before Yoko captured our John and confused him with sexed heroin, burning the gates to utopia, the fires had already been lit by Anita Pallenberg. She similarly seduced Brian Jones from the pharmaceutical world of color to a world of fast brown. The difference with Anita is that she was far more skilled at mass seduction and more fearless in the face of death. She killed the bird.Later, as a sort of freshly re-enacted journalism, Cammell and Roeg use her and the remaining standing stone in a story about rock performance as violent seduction. The mirrors that include the film focus on the use of the actual Anita, and actual Stone, on- set mushrooms and a then novel hallucinogenic cinematic style. Roeg would go from here to do some rather impressive things and his experiments in his sliding frame style is obvious here. In fact, midway through when the rock half of the story eclipsed the thug first half he assumed directorial control.The mirrors in the story are more obvious and less interesting. As any summary will tell you, the attempt here is to conflate the Jagger persona as hungry avatar (using the pre-computer sense of the word) with that of a violent criminal underling. It worked better then, because the performer-as-whore business had been so overused.Now, well the cinema is tame; no one cares about Mick and his girls and we've all forgotten who was pulling the world then.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.