Performance: Roeg, Jagger, and the Gangster's Identity

Warner Bros. thought they were buying a Swinging London romp with Mick Jagger in it. That is not a joke made in retrospect; it is what the paperwork says. The studio had watched A Hard Day’s Night mint money and wanted the same thing with the other band, and Donald Cammell brought them a script about a pop star and a gangster and a house in Notting Hill, and they wrote the cheque.

What came back was a film in which a violent man is chemically and psychologically dismantled in a basement, cut like a nervous breakdown, saturated with sex the studio could not release and drug use it did not understand, ending on an image that resolves nothing. The legend says an executive’s wife was sick at the first screening. Whether or not that is true, the verifiable part is that Performance was shot in 1968 and did not reach cinemas until 1970, spending two years in a vault while Warner tried to work out what it had paid for and Frank Mazzola recut it into something releasable.

The premise, and the trap in it

Chas Devlin (James Fox) is an enforcer for Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), running protection in London with a relish that his employers find increasingly unprofessional. Chas is very good at hurting people and he likes it too much, and when he settles a private score without authorisation, the firm turns on him. He needs to disappear.

He goes to ground in a house in Powis Square, taking a basement room from Turner (Mick Jagger), a rock star who has retired from performing and spends his days in a curtained interior with Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton), pursuing his own dissolution with method. Chas plans to stay a few days and get a passport photograph taken.

The trap is that these two men are the same man. Chas has spent his life performing a role — the hard man, the suit, the voice, the whole East End construction — with total commitment and no interior. Turner has spent his life performing a role and has lost the ability to find anything underneath it, which is why the music stopped. One of them is a professional at a thing he can no longer do; the other is a professional at a thing he does too well. The film puts them in a house together and waits.

Cammell wrote it, Roeg saw it

The co-direction credit is unusual and the division of labour is fairly well understood. Donald Cammell wrote the script, cast it, knew the world, and drove the film’s ideas. Nicolas Roeg co-directed and shot it, and Performance is where his entire subsequent career is invented in public.

Every Roeg film after this — Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth — is built on an editing grammar that this picture establishes: cut on association rather than continuity; let a sound from one scene run under another; put a shot from the future in the middle of the present without flagging it; fragment an act of violence or sex until the audience is assembling it rather than watching it. Roeg was a cinematographer first, and he arrived at the idea that a film could be edited the way memory works rather than the way a story does.

The house is the laboratory. Roeg shoots Powis Square as a nest of reflective surfaces — mirrors angled at each other, glass, water, velvet swallowing the light — so that Chas is rarely photographed alone in a frame. There is always another version of him in the shot, slightly wrong, slightly displaced. By the time the film has him in a wig, no cut is required to make the point. The room has been doing it for forty minutes.

The gangsters were real, or close enough

The texture of Performance’s first act is the reason it is a crime film rather than a psychedelic curio, and it comes from a specific hire. David Litvinoff worked on the film as dialogue coach and adviser, and Litvinoff was genuinely of that world — an associate of the Krays, a man with the accents and the manners and the phone numbers, who brought the right faces onto the set and made sure the firm sounded like a firm.

Johnny Shannon, who plays Harry Flowers with more quiet menace than any professional actor in the film, was a boxing trainer with no acting career, cast because he was correct. Fox reportedly spent time among the real article to build Chas, and the performance has the specific gift of a man from a very different class doing an impersonation so committed it becomes uncanny — which is precisely what the character is doing too.

So the London that Chas leaves is documented down to the vowel, and that gives the basement its charge. The film earns the right to dissolve the hard man because it built one properly first.

Jack Nitzsche, and the sequence in the middle

Jack Nitzsche assembled the music, and the score is a genuine oddity in British cinema: Ry Cooder’s slide guitar, Randy Newman, a Moog, and a set of textures that had no equivalent in a 1970 crime picture. It sounds like nothing that came before it and quite a lot that came after.

The film’s centre is Turner’s number, staged in the basement, in which the retired performer imagines himself as the head of the firm — the boardroom, the men, the authority — and the whole architecture of the picture stands on it. Two roles are exchanged in one sequence: the rock star performs the gangster, having established over an hour that he can no longer perform himself. Roeg cuts it as an actual hallucination rather than as a music number, and the studio, understandably, had no idea what to do with a film that stops dead in the middle to let Mick Jagger become a company director in a dream.

The ancestor is a book

The collector’s reference here is literary and it is on screen. Cammell was steeped in Jorge Luis Borges, and Borges is in the film explicitly — read aloud, and finally seen. The doubles, the labyrinths, the man who is another man, the mirror that is an obscenity because it multiplies people: that is Borges’ equipment, and Cammell imports it wholesale into a genre that had never met it.

Which is why Performance sits oddly beside its British contemporaries. Villain and Get Carter both arrived in 1971 and both take the hard man as a solid object — a psychology in one case, a function in the other. Performance, made before either, takes him as a costume and asks who is wearing it. Thirty years later Sexy Beast would send an English villain to a house in the sun and find the same question waiting: what is a man like this when the role stops.

The case against

It is a difficult, airless, occasionally insufferable film. The first act is thrilling and the second is a stoned argument in a curtained room, and if you do not find Turner’s project interesting then Chas’s boredom becomes yours. Michèle Breton was very young and reportedly did not have a good time making it; the film’s treatment of its women is of its moment in ways that no amount of Borges redeems. Fox is astonishing and gave up acting for years afterwards, which the mythology has always treated as proof of the film’s power and might equally be evidence of a set that was not well run.

And Jagger cannot really act. He does not have to — the role is a man who is only surface — but the film is asking you to accept a rock star playing a rock star as a metaphysical proposition, and the seams show.

Where it sits

Performance was released in 1970, made almost nothing, and became the film British directors cite. It is on decent discs and turns up in repertory constantly, usually programmed against Get Carter, which is the double bill it deserves: the same city, the same year or thereabouts, the same figure, taken apart by two entirely opposed methods.

Spoilers below

Chas shoots Turner. That is the plot’s resolution and the film’s least important event.

By then the exchange has already happened. Chas has taken what Turner and Pherber gave him, has put on the wig and the clothes, has been photographed as someone else, and has lost the ability to hold the performance he has maintained since childhood. Turner, correspondingly, has fed on him — has taken the demon back, the violence, the thing he needed to perform again — and the transaction is complete before the gun appears. The firm finds Chas because Chas allowed himself to be found; a man who has stopped being Chas has no reason to hide.

Then the shot. Cammell and Roeg send the bullet into Turner’s head and follow it — into the skull, through, and out — and what it travels through is not brain tissue. It is a photograph of Jorge Luis Borges. The film has been quoting him all along, and it puts him at the centre of the head, and it is the most brazen gesture in British cinema: the author of the labyrinth, found inside the man, at the moment the labyrinth closes.

Flowers’ men are waiting outside with a Rolls-Royce, and Chas walks out and gets in, and they drive away, and the film’s final act is a single held look. The camera finds the face in the back window of the departing car as it goes.

It is Turner’s.

Nothing explains this and nothing needs to. The two men have swapped, or merged, or one has consumed the other, and the mechanism is irrelevant because the proposition is the point: identity is a performance, performance is the only thing there is, and a man who has spent his life doing an impression of a gangster can be replaced in the role by anyone who learns the part. The firm collects its employee. The employee is somebody else now. The firm does not notice, because the firm never wanted a person — it wanted the performance, and the performance is being delivered, and the car pulls away down an ordinary London street with the wrong man in it and nobody to say so.