One of the ultimate cinematic mindfucks, 1970's Performance, is out on DVD today, and there's no excuse for not owning it. Showcasing great performances by James Fox as a vicious gangster and Mick Jagger as a decadent rock star--or is it the other way around?--Performance means to mess with your head, your sensibilities and your libido, and succeeds admirably. If you want to dig a little, Donald Cammell's script is thick and deep, but if you just want to experience it as a crazy thrill ride, Nicolas Roeg's smashing cinematography and an amazing soundtrack featuring Randy Newman, Jack Nitzche and of course, Jagger (plus Ry Cooder and Lowell George as session players!) will certainly provide that.
Cammell and Roeg co-directed Performance, and the subsequent careers of both men would ultimately prove heartbreaking. Cammell, the godson of Aleister Crowley, was a fixture on the London social scene when he turned to screenwriting, and he turned to directing to protect the integrity of his scripts. Ironically, most of his subsequent output was taken out of his hands anyway, and though there are a handful of cultists who revere his work, ultimately it is only Performance of all his films that is entirely successful.
Roeg would have better luck. In the ten years after Performance, he directed a string of astonishing films--Walkabout (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) and one of my all-time favorites, Bad Timing (1980). But Roeg, an Englishman by birth, had always depended on sometimes shadowy international funding for his films, and never cast his lot with Hollywood studios. As the eighties progressed, he kept busy, doing occasionally fine work (Insignificance in 1985, and the Jim Henson-produced The Witches in 1990), but mostly it was little seen. And some of the jobs he did find, like the TV miniseries Samson And Delilah (starring Liz Hurley!), were not exactly worthy of his talent.
Donald Cammell killed himself in 1996 (According to some accounts, the shotgun to his head didn't kill him immediately, so he fetched a mirror in order to watch himself die!), and Roeg continues to toil away on projects that no one ever sees. Performance is not a sentimental film in the least, but there's still an aura of sadness about it, a promise that could never quite be kept.
