1st
Performance (1970)
A scabby little film from the dead end of the sixties - all you needed to make a picture then were a half-dead rocker and an interest in psychedelics (these days you need a past-its-prime comic book and an uncle at Warner Bros.). The film was shot and finished in 1968 but not released till ’70. The studio thought they were getting their own little A Hard Day’s Night starring the Stones; they wound up with Mick Jagger mumbling around the frame’s edge in a British Easy Rider. ”Executive Not Happy” may have been the first post-screening note. The film has gained a reputation with certain people - mostly the people who worked on it - as being incendiary, explicit, and shocking. Maybe it was, if you were a conservative radio critic in 1971. Today it’s just pleasantly bizarre. Your mom, feeling generous, would call the film “experimental.” By that she would mean “weird.” James Fox plays a Brit hitman in trouble with his mob boss. His offense is unclear, but it’s serious enough that he’s ready to expatriate to the States (authentic homeland of all authentic gangsters); he lays over in the apartment of Mick Jagger (playing a barely disguised version of self) while the border hopping paperwork is prepared. The film makes no sense - no sense, at least, to me. Who knows. You may watch the film and be amazed. Perhaps it will affirm all the little anxieties of your life - “you were right to drop out of art school and become a part-time fry cook/part-time pole dancer” the film may say to you. And, by golly, good for you. Finding art that speaks to you is a rare, worthy thing, and this film, stutter-step, over-full metaphor that it is, may be the one to sing your lost-in-America tune.
The picture, shot by Nicholas Roeg and half-directed by same, has all the tick marks of that Brit lens-slinger’s best and worst films: death-fetish sexual obsession; stream-o-consciousness editing; and a thing for Bowie look-a-likes who dig on thin boygirls. At its very peak moments, the film is layered, surprising and strikingly ominous. Roeg is the only semi-modern director to have really taken Eisenstein’s theories of montage to heart: he uses cuts like Stick-Em Glue for visual abstractions, glomming together mix-n-match ideas (Mick’s lips and a rusty faucet; a woman’s parted thighs and a boxer’s right hook), letting you (kind viewer) sort the meanings out. Sort of a BYOL affair - bring your own logic. So long as you can keep up, inventing the story and the subtext, the film is great fun. But, when the film steps too far outside the bounds of its viewers’ patience and imaginations, things grind down - you start looking around at the other theater goers’ faces to see if they still “get it.” This inconsistency may be a consequence of an excess of enthusiasms on set - Roeg shot every possible action from every possible angle, twice. The nice thing about having too much footage is that, in the dank little editing bay where film art really happens, you have a shot vocabulary large enough to say nearly anything. The bad thing about having too much footage is that if you aren’t highly judicious in your edits, the film may end up an overwhelming cacophony - like a massive group seizure at a high school spelling bee. Whoever edited the film made double sure to include all the extra bits from the rough-cut rubbish bin; nice sometimes, overstimulating at others.
Jagger belts two numbers in the film, thankfully (the worst mistake a film with a rock star headliner can make is to keep the star’s pipes from screaming; why hire a singer if not for singing?). The first song is a straight diegetic number: a spikey, blood-shuddering blues rant sung in the middle of an argument with Fox. The song is true and it holds you. It’s an example of why I’ll always love Mick: he knows (or knew) how to get at his great barbaric YAWP. Not too many - maybe not any - of the cocky-swagger bands of today can get anywhere near the resounding bellows of a well tuned, in-his-prime Jagger; the best most of them can manage is a startled “yip.” Performance’s second number, though, is an example of while I’ll always be a little irked at Mick-o too: he frequently confuses grandstanding with honest masculinity. Falling out of a group psychedelic trip (Mick and his merry pranksters want, apparently, to dig into Fox’s kill-or-go-limp HeMan brain; they use a vial of acid to do it) the second number is lamed from the start. Jagger’s voice, obviously recorded in a studio and not on set, is too clear and too perfect. The song might have worked if Roeg and company had used on-set sound, but the lip-synced lyrics make the whole thing smack of record label money grubbing. It’s just a pre-MTV music video. If you watch the film on dvd, skip ahead when you see Jagger dressed in pinstripes, sporting a greaser hairdo - you wont miss anything from the plot, and you’ll save yourself a bit of lost respect for Mick.
