Performance
dir. Nicholas Roeg
1970


"Who are you?"
- The Caterpillar

"If you think that a kiss is all in the lips, come on, you got it all wrong man."
- The White Stripes

"Who ARE those guys?"
- Butch and Sundance

The Strand theater in San Francisco has seen better days. Boarded up now, it has variously been a porn grind house, shooting gallery and all around den of inequity.

But in the mid 80s, it was one of a handful of places you could regularly see films like Blade Runner, Walkabout, and The Man who Fell to Earth on a large (if somewhat torn and soda-stained) screen.

One Saturday afternoon, A Clockwork Orange (on the short list of my favorite films) was double billed with a little number called Performance, starring Mick Jagger and newly available on DVD.

The double bill was a reference to the fact that Jagger had been considered for the part of Alex before Kubrick (wisely) decided to go with relative newcomer Malcolm McDowell.

Jagger's star appeal would detract from the otherworldliness of the piece. Added to which, the film is narrated in a quasi-Russian futuristic slang. McDowell may not be the world's greatest actor, but one thing he can do is e-nun-ci-ate.

I mean, I still don't know what Jumpin' Jack Flash is about. And that's in English.

Imagine Mick Jagger mumbling his way through "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rasoodocks what do do with the evening. The Korova Milkbar served Milk Plus. That is milk plus velocet, or synthemesc or drencom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence."

No, Jagger is a bad boy, but he's a bad boy from our world: a world of sex, drugs, rock n' roll and ever shifting, self-created identities. This is the world of Performance. A place so familiar, it's practically unrecognizable.

Enter James Fox as Chas. Chas is a high class lowlife, an enforcer for a London mob boss. When he gets into the kind of trouble that people in his line of work often get into, he goes underground, renting a flat from an eccentric artist/musician and his rather fembot-like, uh, flatmates.

The drama unfolds as Chas, hunted by his somewhat aggressive coworkers, loses himself in Turner's narcissistic world.

Both men struggle with the self. Turner yearns for self expression, for the "ultimate performance" which "destroys the performer." Chas, a refugee, struggles for self definition.

By the time Chas' chickens come home to roost, the line between the two men has faded completely.

Performance can best be described as "avant-garde" which means you will be treated to sequences of Mick Jagger (literally) painting his red door black, sex scenes shot from the point of view of linens, one or two impromptu music videos and self-conscious references to Borges.

The piece is flawed, at times incoherent. What's remarkable is not so much what this film achieved as what it pre-saged. This film was far, far ahead of its time.

James Fox's Chas would be right at home in a Tarantino or Ritchie film with his easy sadism, gangster/hipster cool and direct manner. The experimental visuals during Jagger's musical interludes could more than hold their own today on MTV.

Warner Brothers initially refused to support the film. They thought they were getting a Rolling Stones version of Hard Day's Night, not a hippy head-trip gangland fever dream.

In retprospect, this is, in fact, Mick Jagger's Hard Day's Night. And a lot harder than the Beatles version, I might add. The Stones have always been a grittier, tougher more real band than the Beatles.

For all their popularity and musical innovation, the message of Beatles never really got past the "gee, wouldn't it be cool if we all just ate magical beans and danced around?" stage.

From the beginning, the Stones went after the fatuous, narcissistic, toxic, drug- and sex-addicted world of everyday life.

Maybe that's why the Beatles broke up before I was in grade school and the Stones are still out there rocking when they're not falling out of coconut trees and snorting up their dead relatives.

Once you establish that it would be nice if everything was nice, there's not much more you can say. But the well of human weakness never runs dry.

John and Paul never told us that we can't always get what we want. They never questioned the value of mother's little helpers. They never painted a red door black. They had no sympathy for the devil.

Performance could have been just a madcap romp through groovy 60's London, and it would have made money and maybe even been good.

Thankfully, Cammell and Roeg reached a little higher and gave us something more than a commerical for a boy band.

Three stars, Mick Jason sez, Jumpin' Jack Flash is NOT a metaphor for big dicks.